Searchmetrics has released a new study showing how universal search can help marketers in search visibility. This certainly isn’t a groundbreaking concept. We’ve discussed this plenty in the past, but the firm shares universal search data, which it has used …

Update: Looks like there is likely to be a lot more local action coming Google’s way soon. 

More so than when a nice, big keyboard is at hand, every moment and character counts when someone is trying to search using a smartphone.   It’s rather significant, then, that universal search features have been introduced to Google Suggest for mobile.

WebProNews talked to a lot of interesting people at Search Engine Strategies in New York this week, and one theme that ran through more than one of these conversations was the relationship between user attention and usability and how this relates to search marketing.

Note: There is plenty more useful information in the videos embedded in this article than the points I have referenced. I suggest watching the interviews in their entirety for some helpful advice.

At SES Chicago last year, Yahoo VP of Consumer Products, Larry Cornett suggested that blended search results bring businesses a broader range of SEO opportunities, a chance to take control of their brand, and a potential increase in qualified clicks. While these blended results can tend to divert users away from organic listings, as SEO Dave Naylor pointed out at that same conference, Cornett does have a point.

In case you were thinking that Google hadn’t made enough announcements this week, they have made a couple more. First, they are adding universal search results to Google Suggest, and second, they have released a new Chrome extension called Google Quick Scroll.

As Google’s search engine competitors often bring up, searchers want more than just "ten blue links" these days. Of course it has been quite a while now since search results from any of the big three were only ten blue links for most searches. We are well into the era of blended search.

As you may know, Google’s Matt Cutts frequently answers user questions by posting videos to the Google Webmaster Central YouTube channel, and the latest one he tackled has to do with videos ranking for universal search on Google. Here is the question that Cutts received:

Google is now showing images in universal search results for location queries. They have shown maps for some time, but the addition of images enriches the results that much more.

A number of people have noticed that Google is viewing their websites as blogs when they are not really blogs. They are finding that Google is placing them in blog search portions of universal search results in regular Google searches.

Today Google made a couple of announcements involving the expansion of offerings into more languages. They’ve announced that the new optimized SERP pages for iPhones, Android devices, and feature phones are now available in over 60 countries and 38 languages. In addition, the company has announced an advanced translation feature in the newest release of Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer.

The Mobile SERPs

At PubCon, Bruce Clay, Inc. President Bruce Clay presented at a session entitled "Top-Shelf Organic SEO" in which he discussed the approaching future of SEO as search engines evolve into more modern ranking methods through more personalized search results. Bruce was good enough to take the time to speak with our own Michael McDonald in a one-on-one interview about personal search, which can be viewed in the video below.

One of the most interesting sessions at this upcoming Search Engine Strategies in Chicago is going to be Universal & Blended Search. Dr. Larry Cornett, VP, Consumer Products, Yahoo! Search is one of the top experts in the world on this subject and is also a panelist at this session in SES Chicago. Last week I had the opportunity to chat with Dr. Cornett to get his insight on blended search and to get a better understanding of Yahoo’s future in this area.

The core EveryZing business of speech to text technology added a new component, called RAMP, to its search and optimization technologies for indexing multimedia content and making it available to search crawlers.

John Battelle, who literally wrote the book on Search, believes Google’s apparent media-company aspirations will one day come in conflict with its purist algorithmic history.

Mike McDonald and the WebProNews Video crew are in New York for the Search Engine Strategies Conference. Stay tuned all week for the latest developments in online marketing.

Michael and I had the opportunity to attend the SMX (Search Marketing Expo) last week in sunny Santa Clara, CA.

Universal search presents retailers an opportunity to reach searchers with more information than a few words of plain text.

The big thing in search brings more than text to searchers. Images and video figure in the universal search plans of the major engines.

If you use Google to search, then you have probably seen their universal search, which shows more than just html documents in the search results.

Major companies are now seeing the benefits of using universal search to search their internal resources. Professional services firms, especially law firms, are using universal search tools to instantly locate content, wherever it’s located.

Zvents announced their launch of a new, blended search results page for local content. Now, when you do searches on their site, they’ll bring back results for various businesses, events, performances, movies, store sales and more in your local area. Here’s a screengrab of the newly-blended results page:

In this month’s Target Marketing Magazine, a TopRank authored article on how small businesses can gain a competitive marketing advantage by leveraging content promotion, blogs, social media and universal search was featured.

The New York Times today reported on a recent Hitwise post by Heather Hopkins highlighting that Google was now sending about three times as many of their users over to Google Maps comparing a week ending January 6th with a yea