I’ve been watching Google Beta for a long time – they always have interesting toys there.  Sometimes they come and go pretty quickly without ever being released, then sometimes you see them turn back up in a slightly different form. 

The “exotic searches” as I personally labelled the different search tools on Google, have had my attention for sometime now. We experimented with searches in Google Books and Google Videos last summer to see if there was valuable SEO data there. At the time, my biggest complaint was that the number of items reported to be found on the status bar for any given subject wasn’t just wrong; it was exponentially off the mark. But hey, it IS beta. 

This last week has seen the release of a subtle new Google. They are sneaking in results from other “exotic search” media like books and videos and even blogs when the natural web results are deemed less important than those of corresponding alternate media.  

This, they say, is just the first step. 

So now when you do a search for a more obscure topic, like Darth Vader, you’ll see image and book results pop up at the top of the page. At other times, the results don’t pop up right at the top, but are embedded like a normal search result – only the “Google video” link is the give away that what you are looking at is not some competing web page. 

The familiar links to all the media are still up at the top, though now they are expanded to include a drop down menu with even more categories than before… And often you will see some of these categories actually recommended on the status bar that displays the number of competing pages! 

Eagerly I slid over to books, did a query – wow, several thousand books were supposedly returned…   Could it be? I know they have been working like crazy to get more books online.  Is it possible they have they fixed the faulty counting problem? 

Alas, no – setting my page size to 100 queries returned allowed me to quickly find the limit of the actual books – or blog entries, or whatever – at a more than substantially smaller number than the results indicated. Darn!  

But still, the integrated search results page a good first step.

So what will this mean to you, the webmaster, and your SEO efforts?  Probably not too much for the next couple of months, but obviously as new media starts to come to the forefront, webmasters who have taken the time to ensure a quality website, and even better, have expanded into the blog sphere, gotten themselves in the news and ventured into the video arena will have an advantage over those who have not.  It's definitely time to start moving in multimedia dimensions!

Sue Bell

ThemeZoom Team
www.themezoom.com