Tag: Universal Search

Brian Solis has just published The Definitive Guide to Social Media Releases. It would appear that Social Media Releases are what Press Releases have morphed into in this new multimedia interconnected world. One quote brings out a key part of his message.

So again, we ask, what makes a Social Media Release Social?

Well, at the end of the day, if you’ve ever written a blog post, much of what I’m describing already exists. There’s nothing to say that you couldn’t do this right now simply by creating a customized blog that is an extension of your company’s online newsroom.

This marketer’s realization that blogs provide a powerful mechanism for communicating with the marketplace comes at an auspicious time. It would seem that Google also now strongly believes that blog posts often provide the most relevant information in keyword searches.

The speed at which Google is latching on to blog posts has been commented on very recently by a number of Internet marketing commentators, such as Search Engine Journal (Julie Kent), WebProNews (Doug Caverly) and Search Engine Roundtable (Tamar Weinberg). However a comment by Michael Martinez on the last item questions whether this is really new.

Indeed it is not new. It is just the latest step in a process that Marissa Mayer announced in May 2007 with a post on Universal search: The best answer is still the best answer. Universal search would provide the most relevant answers to keyword searches from all the search processes that Google did.

It has not been smooth and continuous improvement from that point onwards. Prior to that, Google had been indexing blog posts extremely well based on their RSS news feeds. It was rapid and it was relevant. Results could be accessed by using Google Blogsearch. By October inexplicably the results became somewhat chaotic, as we discussed in the Cre8asite Forums. By the end of November, curiouser and curiouser, blog posts were indexed better in the regular Web search than they were in the Blogsearch.

Since then the visibility of blog posts in the regular Web search has been even stronger. You can still find the Google Blogsearch if you look for it, but it clearly has lost star billing. The main choices on the regular Web search program are as follows:

If you click on that ‘more’ then you will see the menu shown on the right. It’s probably only a matter of time before the option to search Blogs disappears entirely. However Google has always been notoriously slow at firing processes that are no longer seen as useful.

So the message is clear. Blog posts are just regular web pages like those to be found in any website. Indeed given Google’s fixation on inlinks (or back links as they somewhat confusingly describe them), it is not surprising that blog posts tend to be more visible than regular web pages.

Once the marketers really smell the coffee, we can expect to see many more Social Media Releases coming out as blogs.