Searchlight

Search is a constantly evolving and changing entity, and this year has certainly seen more than its fair share of change. Possibly highest on the list has been the move to blended or universal results. Much of the focus and discussion has revolved around Google Universal, but they aren't the only game in town and all the majors have now entered into blended results to some extent or another.

This presents interesting opportunities and challenges. Those who focus on developing a fuller and broader Web presence, adding video, news, blogs, images, local content and social media to the mix, greatly increase their opportunities to gain rank positions across all the engines. The challenge however will be that the results across the engines may become even more varied, as each engine puts its own spin on the blending.

It's still very early in the game as the engines continue to ramp up and tweak their algos as they evolve and introduce searchers to blended results. It will be interesting to watch the evolution of blended search across the different engines. Today, results vary within the engines. Some searches show little to no signs of blended results, and others, show considerably more.

For an interesting example, let's take a look at a single search across the engines and see how they compare. Since we are talking about how blended search is evolving, what better search term than "cavemen" to use as a test. It is an interesting term for our test because it has such a wide frame of reference and actually poses a rather interesting challenge for the engines. Depending on the searcher, it may carry very different connotations:

• Prehistoric humans
• The definition of the word itself
• The ad campaign for the Geico commercials
• The newly launched sitcom on ABC based on the Geico commercials

Here are screenshots of that search in Google, Yahoo, MSN (Live Search) and Ask. It is interesting to see the variety of the impact of blended results across the engines, from very little to considerable impact. As you experiment with different searches though, you may see the engines' position on this scale shift up or down.

Along with calling out some of the specific blended results, I've also noted some of the refinement options, such as related searches, narrowed or expanded searches, and Yahoo's new "Search Assist."

Ask.com SERPs.

Google SERPs.

Yahoo SERPs with Search Assist.

MSN Live SERPs.

While the survival of the new Cavemen series may be in question, the continued evolution and survival of blended search is without doubt.

Whether you have multiple locations or just one, local is fast becoming an important market online. Traditionally, the local marketing battlefield consisted of phone directory listings, billboards, newspapers, TV, radio, and anywhere else that made sense to get your name seen. The web and search engines have opened up a new local battlefield, and smart businesses are moving quickly to gain a foothold.

Surprisingly though, many businesses have failed to tap into one of the more powerful tools available for reaching the local market. If that's surprising, then what makes this amazing is that this tool is free and will become even more important as local search information continues to be blended into regular search results.

The major search engines saw the growth and importance in local search years ago and started putting tools in place to not only help searchers, but also businesses. What the search engines may have discovered was that many searchers weren't aware of these local search tools, like local.google.com and local.yahoo.com. Instead, people just searched for local things where they searched for everything else, which further helps to explain things like universal search.

What was really exciting though was that the search engines also provided businesses with a way to get listed. Yet many businesses have yet to tap into this opportunity. If this sounds like you, then there is no time to waste, and better yet, getting listed takes no time at all. The process varies by engine, but is often as simple as having a postcard sent to your business address, receiving an automated phone call at your business location, or filling out a form or email.

Google

Go to local.google.com and click on the "Add or Edit your business: Learn more" link along the left side. If you don't have a Google Account yet, you'll need to create one. Once you've done that, you'll get access to the Local Business Center, where you can add or edit your business listing.

Yahoo

At listings.local.yahoo.com, you'll see that Yahoo provides different listing levels, including a basic free listing. The Basic listing is done in 4 easy steps, while the paid versions have an extra step or two.

MSN Live Search

Not as direct, you'll need to click on the Help link in the upper right corner at local.live.com, and then select the first FAQ item, "How do I add my business listing to Live Search Maps?" From there you'll get a link to an infoUSA.com form for adding or updating your information as need be.

Ask

Even Ask wants to list your local business. Even less intuitive than the others, you'll need to follow the Help link in the upper right corner at city.ask.com, then toward the bottom of the FAQs is one labeled, "I'm not finding my business in AskCity. How can I get it added?" With Ask, you'll need to send off an email with some information to Ask's Customer Service.

Web site owners and SEOs alike often feel at odds with the search engines, but times are changing. This was often the case in the past when the engines made updates and changes to their algorithms that seemed to send Web sites into a SERP tailspin, leaving everyone scrambling to regain their precious page-one positions. The engines were also a lot less forthcoming with information and guidance, perhaps taking the view that giving this information gave too much power to the spammers and phishers.

While this view was understandable on the surface, it didn't float all that well in reality. In the real world, those who are out to game and manipulate the engines may have as many or more resources to keep up with the engines than "the rest of us." So over the last few years, the search engines have continued to be more open with what they consider important as well as what abuses may get sites into trouble, perhaps realizing that there are also a lot of sites that may not have been purposely trying to mislead the engines, but were just victims of bad advice. And of course the algorithms have become far more powerful and fine-tuned than they once were.

By openly helping everyone, they are really just helping to raise the bar of quality for all sites, and maybe even making it even harder for bad sites to game the engines. Along with providing more detailed information and answering more and more questions publicly, the greatest advancement they have made has been in creating tools to actually give site owners (who have validated their sites) more information about their sites than they've ever experienced before.

Webmaster Central and Webmaster Tools

Google introduced Webmaster Central, which continues to add more and more features for site owners. Not surprising, Webmaster Central is leading the pack in delivering great information and tools to Webmasters. At the center, literally, is Webmaster Tools, which provides site owners with fairly detailed information on site crawling, queries, considerably more backlink information than can be queried outside of Tools, and much more. The query information in particular provides an unprecedented view of the search phrases that a site is showing up for, including those terms that aren't actually delivering traffic to the site.

Site Explorer

Yahoo's Site Explorer is still lacking in a few areas compared with Google's Webmaster Tools, but they almost make up for that with their powerful link information. Through simple drop-down menus, it is quick and easy to tailor results based on links to a specific page or the entire site, to include all links or to exclude links from the site and focus on external links only. Yahoo added a new feature that may give even more control to site owners. The Dynamic URLs tab gives site owners the ability to inform Yahoo of their site's dynamic URL patterns to help eliminate duplicate content issues, better handling of multiparameter URLs, addressing session IDs, and even presenting "cleaner" URLs in search results. Ideally, it would be best to address as many of these issues through rewrites and the robots.txt file on the server, but this is a great addition as a backup or for when that isn't possible.

Webmaster Portal

Trying not to be outdone, the Live Search team at MSN recently announced their entry into the mix with the Webmaster Portal, currently in beta and by request only. Little detailed information is available, but their tool also is claiming to help troubleshoot crawl issues, assist with sitemaps, and provide site statistics, including a replacement to the "link:" operator query that was decommissioned back in March. The portal is slated to be fully available to the public by late fall, but it may be worthwhile to request an invite to participate in the beta now.

The advancement in all of these tools is great news to Webmasters and SEOs alike. They continue to put more information and control into our hands. Not wanting to be outdone by the others, hopefully each of the engines will add each other's additions to their own toolsets. As each of these is free, there is no reason for site owners not to take a few minutes to validate their sites and start spending a little time each month putting these tools to work for them. This is one invitation from the spiders you don't want to turn down.