You'd have had to have your head truly stuck in the sand not to notice the news about Google Universal Search, the new multiple content search engine results page from Google, where news, video and just about anything get factored and ranked within a single results page. Bye bye Onebox, hello video in position 2.

This really shouldn't have been a surprise to our industry, the above the fold organic results have been getting more and more squeezed by the Onebox, and only via bringing in more specialised results can Google improve the user experience, or generate a perceived improvement. On another note they could also sort out their handling of NRS TLD's to actually get more highly relevant content into the right results filters but Matt already knows that.

Anyway the story has caused a load of dumb and alarmist news articles and posts regarding the death of search engine marketing - a la:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/?p=1363
&
http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticleHomePage&art_aid=60584

Contrary to these naive views, what 'Universe' does is exactly what I predicted would happen in my 'Future of SEO' presentation for the SMA-UK at the Eyefortravel event in June last year, it increases the range of data and results heavily influenced by algorithms and incorporated into the results page, and that makes good SEO expertise even more valuable than before because you have to work across so many more content types.

What does this mean for SEO's? Certainly not the end of the search marketing industry, but most definitely a new focus on a much broader range of content and data, and certainly lots of cool new positioning opportunities ;-)

The 'universe' is your oyster. Exciting times.