In May 2007 Google announced the universal results in Google Search with the philosophy of integrating all departments Images, Blogs, News, Products, Maps, Books and videos directly to the traditional results page.

About a year later, Google has enabled this feature to Google results in Brazil. Thus, we could see an usability and integration increase of Google products, providing an increasingly rich content to users' searches. Faced with this growing integration of Google products in Universal Results and thinking about the increase of local results, our company decided to create a test to analyze the current state of Universal Search in Brazil, making several queries on Google Brazil, and thus obtaining information on the amount appearances of each Google Product.

Data Set

This research used 2021 terms, where each one was submitted to Google search 4 times between the period 01 October to 13 October, amounting to a total of 8084 queries. In this 2021 terms group, we had the following scenario:

For each queries we investigate if the result had shown the following Google Products:  

• BlogsSearch
• Images
• Maps
• News
• Videos

Thus, we obtained the following results:

Blog Search

During the four executions we could notice a slight results variation, where the fourth execution, we obtained the least amount of results with BlogsSearch, 183. Already in the first run we got the largest, reaching 245 queries with BlogsSearch.

The overall average of four executions shows that 10.1% results have BlogsSearch and 89.9% do not.

Images

In images scenario we noted that the results show a good amount of related images. In the first execution we got the least image amount results, 963. In the last batch execution, we noticed the greatest image results amount, 1001.

The general average of four executions shows that 48.7% results have images and 51.3% do not.

Maps

Regarding the maps, the scenario is much more stable. In the first three executions we obtained 63 results containing maps and only the last execution we receive results containing 62 maps.

The general average of four executions shows that 3.1% of the results and 96.9% do not. Something curious about this map analysis was that almost all the results containing maps have a city or location tied to any term. This shows that slowly the local searches are being integrated into the universal results.

News

Like images, the news is much more frequent in Google results. According to the data, the third execution had the least results amount with news, 777. In the first batch execution, we noticed the largest results amount with news, 880.

The general average of four executions shows that 40.8% results have news and 59.2% do not.

Videos

In one better scenario than blogs or maps results, videos will appear in a reasonable queries amount. In our executions, we had in last run, the least results amount with videos, 547. In the first batch execution, we noticed the largest results number with videos, 562.

The general average of four executions shows that 27.4% results have and 72.6% do not.

Universal Results Intersection

As we know, a Google Result Page not only shows one of Universal Search Items, but mostly is shown a combination of these items. Below we show a table with the main combinations found in the results pages.

Conclusions

This research drew an X-ray of how Universal Results are displayed in Google Brazil, where we summarize the following scenarios:

• 10.1% of search queries showed BlogsSearch
• 48.7% of search queries showed Images
• 3.1% of search queries showed Maps
• 40.8% of search queries showed News
• 27.4% of search queries showed videos

From this research, we want create some variations modifying the terms and time period trying to figure out if it changes how Google Universal results are displayed.

Before ending this article I would like to thank all from our programming team that made this research possible. (Celso Fernandes, Rodrigo Tomonari, Rodrigo Sales, Hiroshi Eduardo and Felipe Rosa)

I hope you enjoyed this research and see you!

Ps.: I would like to know if you are interested in a US Research, so please, comment below asking for and we will do this research.