Search Engine Journal

A potentially troublesome trend in search involves search engines acting much like portals. More than ever, Web users are interacting with a particular website’s content without ever leaving SERPs.

To see this in action, try searching videos on Google, Yahoo, or MSN Live.

MSN Live’s video-viewing interface is particularly sophisticated. Mouse over the thumbnailed videos that come up for your search and they will play – with sound and all. Click on a video, and the full-sized version will appear, allowing you to watch it without ever leaving the SERPs.

Depending on the search, some of the videos will be pulled from MSN Video, but many aren’t. When we searched “snowboarding” in MSN, we found videos from MSN Video, YouTube (owned by Google), and other video hosting sites, as well as personal websites and MySpace pages – all playable from within the MSN Live interface.

In this example, a YouTube video is viewable from within an MSN Live results page:

Similarly, when “snowboarding” is searched in Yahoo, you get a SERP full of YouTube videos that can be viewed from within SERPs.

This trend toward SERPs-as-destinations is perhaps the most visible in Google. For many queries related to weather, stock results, businesses, and more, the Google SERP is as far as you need to go to get the information you seek.

And if you do get sent to another publisher’s site, it’s often a property owned by the search engine.

Google, for example, “sent nearly 400 million search referrals to their own media properties over six months,” Kevin Newcomb wrote back in March. “That includes 148 million referrals to YouTube and 173 million to Google Images, the comScore data show.”

This raises the question: are search engines becoming preoccupied with pushing searchers to their own properties, eliminating many of the incentives advertisers have to gain top rankings?

If You Scratch My Back…

If you created a video and posted it on your blog, you would likely be peeved if another blogger stole it for use on their own site. But what if a search engine appropriated your content instead?

Of course, search engines have been appropriating content for ages. Content publishers have happily allowed search engines to crawl and cache their content – and in return, search engines drove traffic to their websites.

It was a give-and-take deal: I give you my content, and you give me website traffic. But now, the second part of that equation is eroding. Will publishers and search marketers begin to rebel? More importantly, should they?

Should advertisers be satisfied that our content is being viewed by searchers, even if that exposure isn’t translating to page views and site traffic the way it used to before Universal Search was rolled out?

The Downside of Universal Search

Universal (blended) search models are still very new, and they present positives and negatives for searchers. Initially, this new model created opportunities for content publishers and search marketers to optimize videos, podcasts and other types of content.

But it seems as it this new model of universal search, previously a boon, is now turning into a bust. At the very least, it’s raising questions about whether search engines are morphing into media companies and the value of ranking highly for certain terms when that visibility doesn’t necessarily translate to site traffic.