Over at Search Engine Land some days ago, Google’s David Baile provides you with an inside look into Google’s “universal search� efforts. As you may know, since some time Google is displaying the so-called onebox results integrated & ranked right within results, and not always on top. This adds more flexible weighting to results pages: if a onebox – like a News or video result – is important but not that important, it moves some ranks below into the middle of the page.

On a side-note, David also mentions that the term “onebox� did originally not refer to the specific results box on the result page, but to the unified search box approach (which these result boxes help facilitate because you don’t need to switch to other niche search engines if you’re looking for e.g. a News, or video results). By now, “onebox� commonly refers to those result boxes though, whereas “universal search� has become the term to describe Google’s unified results pages approach.

Google, David Baile, Universal Search, Onebox

Source:? Google Blogoscoped