Squidbyte Blog

In May Google unveiled it’s famed Universal Search. Much fanfare was made of this at the SES San Jose event and it was even commented on by several speakers as being the ‘biggest change in the search landscape’ in years.

This may well be the case but it’s yet to be rolled out globally in full.

An example of this can be seen when searching for ‘APEC’ (the biggest thing in the news around Sydney at the moment – here). This is how the results look on Google.com.

And, this is how it looks if you perform the same search on Google.com.au:

Google maps have been incorporated into the SERPs for a short while now in Australia but soon there is bound to be several new additions that will follow what is seen in the US version of Google. This not only has implications as to the way that people will be finding information online but will also have major implications with the search industry and the way people optimise their sites everywhere. No longer is it only the text on the page that you will need to SEO, but images, news feeds, videos (BTW, these must be uploaded to YouTube and other ‘trusted’ sites to be included in the SERPs) and other content as well.

How will this affect people trying to scratch together an income from publishing material on the web? Time to change your ways and adapt – either that or get left behind.

A quick heads-up to some people that I met in San Jose this year.

Emilio from Blogsvertise – thanks for the great dinner and wine.
Dave Mihm – Dave does some great work for small businesses and builds some killer websites.
Lucas Ng from Fairfax Digital (SMH, Drive, RealEstate.com.au).
Roger Montti – another wine buff, aka Martini Buster
Natasha Robinson from News (MySpace Video, American Idol).
Patrick Sexton – aka Feed The Bot and has some really insightful thoughts on the direction of the web and what it means to the average person (whomever that may be).

This Saturday, just gone, I returned from a whirlwind trip to San Jose, California where I attended the Search Engine Strategies 2007 conference. I attended the same event in 2004 and, probably as no surprise to most people, it just keep getting bigger with around 7000 people in attendance.

SES comprises all things internet but has a big focus on search engine optimisation as well as search engine marketing. If you want to play the SEO/SEM game, this is where you need to be.

In the next few days I’ll be giving more detailed updates on the goings-on and some insights into where things may be headed in the industry. So, watch this space.

Squidbyte finally becomes a blogger….God help us all.