When Google introduced Universal Search, there was an uproar. Search Marketers either praised the idea of having additional opportunities to rank in the SERPs or feared that others would knock them off the page by ranking in important verticals.

Soon, Yahoo and MSN wanted to jump on board, as well. Meanwhile, Ask was already doing a better job of integrating verticals into their results than any of the rest of them. However, being a star doen’t get you much attention when you play for a C league team.

There was a flurry of integration - a few images, but mostly news stories and videos. Now, I see much, much less of it than in the past.  Whatever happened to Universal Search?

Relevance. Google-and the rest of us who praised the delivery of Universal results-are nor finding relevance. Seriously, once the freshness factor wore off, how often did you click on non-standard results? Apparently, you and I are not the only ones.

From the results pages, Google tracked click throughs, clickbacks, time on page and possibly a few other factors and came to the conclusion that most of the vertical results displayed in the SERPs were not really what people were searching for. So why clog up the results pages with irrelevant listings?

That’s what happened to Universal Search. Where it goes from here, we can only speculate.