Is Google Not So Portal-Like After All?
(Search Engine Watch)

During the Orion Panel on universal search at last week's Search Engine Strategies conference, James Lamberti, SVP of search and media at comScore, presented new data that raised a series of new questions.

As Kevin Ryan reported in "Uncovering the Real Universal Search," comScore found that in only one week in January, of 1.2 billion search queries in the U.S., there were 220 million universal search results. That means 17 percent of all searches on Google showed at least one result with video, news, images, maps, weather, or stocks.

The data also showed that 57 percent of the 87 million people who searched during that week in January saw some type of universal search result. Of those, 38 percent saw a video result, 34 percent saw news, 19 percent saw images, and 15 percent saw multiple types of results.

Google is now sending 78 percent more downstream referrals to YouTube, 40 percent more to Google Maps, and 18 percent to Google Image Search than it was before universal search debuted last year on May 16. However, the data showed no growth in downstream referrals from Google to Google News.