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By: Anne Haynes

Today I watched the Search Marketing Now Blended Search webinar with Chris Sherman, Executive Editor for Search Engine Land. It was a great webinar and cleared up my understanding of the difference between Universal Search and Blended Search; Universal Search is a Google term and Blended Search is everyone else’s term. I prefer Universal Search because it’s all inclusive and has nothing to do with searching for a blender to buy or finding a blended drink recipe.

Sherman goes into the history of search starting with Search 1.0; Boolean logic and keyword matching. During Search 1.0 content was less structured; no video, limited images and no three tier navigation structures. It was the early 90’s when applications like JAWS for the visually impaired were around, but definitely not mainstream or associated to the W3C. This was the time when InfoSeek sold the keyword “Homes” for $100 dollars and Yahoo! founders; David Filo and Jerry Yang interviewed with Dan Fortune; host of Sound Bytes on KSJS. Note: I was the production assistant for the show and it was amazing to meet the masters behind #1 search engine of it’s time. During Search 1.0 days organizations didn’t need Search Engine Optimization firms or specialists; content wasn’t complex. Just add a few keywords and you were #1.

Then the Search 2.0 era started; Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were searching on Yahoo! during their studies at Stanford and started thinking about citing resources in their papers and drew a logical tie to building a search engine based on document citations. Citation analysis is the logic behind Google and the birth of PageRank and TrustRank. During my college days at San Jose State University I remember meeting people in classes, coffee shops, and bars and writing down the word G-O-O-G-L-E. I felt like a bit of a pioneer during those days, but today everyone knows Google, but people are still learning about blogs.

Chris Sherman made 1 or 2 statements on the above, so assume I did the rest. While he never went into a true definition of Search 3.0, the majority of the webinar was around Blended Search.

So let’s dive in – later this week.

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