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.

apec_on_googlecom.gif

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

apec_on_googlecomau.gif

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.