Google recently announced that they had begun to roll out universal search features, where their search results pages would contain more than just web pages and documents. This has some small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) concerned. The feeling is that they will have less opportunity to occupy that coveted first page of real estate due to the fact that they could now face competition from additional forms of media. Do their worries hold any merit? Will universal search really have a negative affect on SMBs and if so what should they do about it?
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Last summer I did a presentation about the future search and how the massive range of pure data based systems being a precursor to the ’semantic web’ represented a significant change to our industry. So yes I agree SMB’s that are not fast moving enough will lose out, because many are only just getting their heads around basic site level SEO let alone the range of other types of media they should be optimizing and data feeds they need to think about creating. Peter Norvig (head of Google engineering) had a great quote where he described webmasters, I believe as, "incompetent" in a discussion with Tim Berners Lee over the semantic web, because they could barely write decent code let alone get their heads around more advanced concepts, so no matter how wonderful the services provided by the search engines might be they are in danger of being to far advanced for their market, SMBs and most webmasters. "We deal with millions of Web masters who can’t configure a server, can’t write HTML. It’s hard for them to go to the next step." - Peter Norvig Need I say more.