On May 5, 2010, Google changed the way people use the Internet. They have combined all the elements of Universal search, images, videos, webpages, blogs, etc., into an easier way to harness all the online knowledge they hold available. With their new three column UI (User Interface), Google gives the searcher the ability to sort their organic results by images, videos, blogs and news, etc. and then take it a step further by then drilling down deeper within that particular aspect of ‘Universal search’. The question arises, how will this new UI affect the hospitality industry and how can the hospitality industry take advantage of it?

The biggest effect will be how searchers use the internet. While not new – just a lot more obvious to users – these enhanced ways of sorting organic results will allow searchers to explore new angles of a subject. In the hospitality realm, this means searchers will be looking for you in many new ways such as through blogs, pictures, videos, and maps. This new UI will also expose hotels or resorts that have not invested in videos or other forms of social media. The ones that did will be in a great position to harness these new streams potential search organic traffic, while the others might begin to fall back.

If you are one of the unlucky ones that did not invest in developing online videos or in other forms of universal search, you can still get in the game and take advantage of this new Google UI. Some of the ways you can do this is by developing various videos illustrating the many facets of your hotel or resort and posting them on YouTube or your favorite online video site. Another way is to claim your local business listing and develop it with your coupons, pictures and videos. This will ensure your business will have the opportunity to show up in the local listings and on Google maps. Another way is to have plenty of pictures on your website that have proper alt tags. This will allow them to be found easier and with the targeted organic search terms you are going after. As for blog and news sort feature, that can be developed through press releases or even putting a blog on your own site.

Whichever way you look at it, the new Google UI will provide the hospitality industry the ability to gain a lot more exposure through previously under exposed search channels. If your website is older or you have not been investing in a universal online marketing plan, you can still take advantage of the many new features Google is offering with this new UI. Universal search is where the Internet is heading and the sooner the hospitality industry understands and takes advantage of it, the more profit there is to be made.

Google just introduced new features to their search results that brings a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web.  Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before.  When they are relevant, Google will show the most recent posts towards the top of the search results page.

Where do the feeds come from? Google announced official partnerships with the following web entities; Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca to power their aggregate real-time feeds.

Get a first look at the new search interface and some sample searches.

So the big, very big question is what does this mean?  More spam unfortunately. More attempts by affiliate marketers to skew the system in their favor and more automated recycling of posts to always have a presence in real time results. It’s not going to be a bed of roses while the search engines get to grips with reputation management of the contributors that author content on these new partners. We know that Twitter’s user profile management is basic at best. Silly algorithms that weight banal factors as negatives or positives can easily be circumvented and before you know it you’re being stuffed with affiliate cookies and pimped malware for having clicked on what you thought was a legitimate real-time search result from your ‘trusted’, favorite search engine Google.

Moving away from the pessimistic side of what will happen, there will be advantages. More so for mobile search’s integration of real-time results. That’s another post however.

Anyway, real-time is  rolling out over the next few days and when you have it, you’ll see it just happening withing your search results.

Google Social Search is an experimental feature that allows you to do searches that find relevant public web content from people in your social circle.

When you join the Social Search experiment Google will bring up results from your friends and contacts. These special results appear at the bottom of the search results page. Your social circle consists of contacts from your Gmail and sites listed in your Google Profile.

The following people make up your social circle:

• People you’re connected to through social services that you’ve listed in your Google profile, such as Twitter and FriendFeed.
• People in your Gmail (or Google Talk) chat list.
• People in your Friends, Family, and Coworkers contact groups for Google.

If someone you don’t know shows up in your social search results, it’s likely that they’re connected to someone you do know. For example, if you’re following someone on Twitter, and that person is following five other people, those five other people are also included in your social circle.

We all know that a picture is worth a thousand words so we’ve included a video from Google explaining in more detail what Google Social Search is all about. Enjoy!