It’s official. Yahoo! Search announced upgraded features on October 2, including a menu of suggested additional information on a searcher’s topic, and adding multimedia search results (photos, audio and video) to the text links and web sites listed in Yahoo’s standard search results.This follows Microsoft Live Search’s September 26 announcement: expanding its search index four-fold and ignoring search query spelling glitches to provide quicker and deeper Instant Answers. Live Search also claimed an innovation in returning results that fold in photos, videos and blog reviews, regardless of whether the searcher asked for multimedia.

But first, there was Google’s launch in May of what it named “Universal Search” – returning results to searchers that list not simply web pages and links, but blogs, images, news content, videos and other online multimedia, such as maps. As Google applies it, “universal search” would also be termed automatic return of multimedia results, without requiring a specific request for blog posts or videos. (Yahoo! positioned its suggested additional info dropdown menus as “optional” universal results.)

That Makes Three … and Counting

This bundled, multimedia universal search feature, named by first-to-offer-it Google, is not confined to the Big Three search engines. Universal Search features are ready to roll soon from Ask and other Tier Two engines, as well as smaller search players, such as A9.

This push to Universal Search demands the good Roman question: Qui Bono? (Who benefits?)

The most obvious Universal Search benefit is providing searchers with a Big Picture – maybe a literal picture or video – in answer to their queries, without making them use different search “tabs” or “verticals” to access all the different databases on big engine sites.

Multimedia universal search results should also give search marketers more ways to reach more potential traffic: All those substantive Blog posts, positive social media site user reviews of your product, and that video upload to YouTube of a very famous person wearing your brand.

You Know There’s a But

Optimizing web pages to rank in search results will change, for example, demanding more descriptive ALT tags and more keywords embedded in file names and image/video still-frame image tags.

But … no one knows yet if users will accept this Universal Search abundance, including the 28% of online users still on video-unfriendly dial-up connections (RVA Market Research), or search users who are set in their lower-bandwidth, text-friendly search ways.

Then there are Three R’s: Relevant Results and Ranking.

Is there an algorithm that ranks web page relevance against video relevance against news announcement relevance for the same keyword phrase? (Even Google has difficulty relevancy-ranking different media.)

Then there’s the impact of new relevance rankings on SEO efforts and being bumped down Page One search results. (Showing top results from more databases – videos and blog posts and local maps – in universal results has to bump previous top-rank results down or off SERP #1.)

Another “but” is high-bandwidth irrelevancy. For example, a search on “Italian Charm” could bring up images of jewelry accessories, catalogues of bracelet wholesalers and video tours of 17th Century palazzos for lease in Tuscany. Given the different relevance weighting of web pages Quality Scored for content and links, versus relevance of video uploads, universal search results might blur or simply clutter that Big Picture offered to searchers.

Universal Relevance via Vertical

User acceptance of universal search results is still unknown. Different SEO/SEM tactics to rank in universal search will become more important. One tactic is that search marketers will redouble efforts to get listed in specialized databases and vertical search engines, increasing their index-ability to universal results.

Research on user satisfaction with general search engine results conducted by Outsell, Convera, Jupiter Communications and Piper Jaffray produces different percentages but the same conclusion: More than one-third of general search engine users seeking industry or professional information get too many irrelevant standard results returned to them on first query. That first-query failure rate for business/professional searchers, added to more selective online media consumption by a majority of all search users, is driving the growth of niche-targeted resources and vertical search.

Search marketers who want to make it into Universal Search Results – through blogs, news releases, site images, videos and research reports, in addition to content-rich and strategically linked web pages – will pursue listings in as many verticals and specialized databases as possible.