Is Yahoo! going for universal search?

It’s only a few months since Google decided to provide its search engine result pages with additional media. The so called “universal search” was born. The Google SERP’s no longer only offer webpages, but also news, images, videos, maps, stock information,… Sure it will make our SEO work more difficult, but also more challenging.

And now Yahoo! seems to be going the same way. Is Yahoo! gradually adding extra information to its result pages? Sure looks like it! Techcrunch noticed Yahoo! SERP’s today that mentioned the number of times a web page was added to del.icio.us.

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website that is owned by Yahoo!. It allows you to store (and share) your bookmarks online. The number of times a web page is saved to del.icio.us is an indication of the website’s popularity. Since this is valuable information owned by Yahoo!, why not use it in the SERP’s?

According to Techcrunch it looks something like this (I cannot reproduce it, so I’m going to borrow their image):

The comments are positive, and apparently a lot of people seem to use del.icio.us as a secondary search engine.

I have previously written that Delicious search is one of the best ways of searching for things when a standard search doesn’t pull up what you are looking for. After Google, it is my favorite “search engine.” Adding this information into Yahoo search is a great idea.

And I couldn’t agree more. Will this be the start of Yahoo! 2.0?

Below you’ll find the Yahoo! universal search results I could come up with today, compared to the Google ones. If you know of more universal Yahoo! results, let me know!

Yahoo! image results (when searching for “Yahoo logo“):

Google image results (when searching for “Google logo“):

Yahoo! news results (when searching for “Clinton Obama“):

Google news results (when searching for “Clinton Obama“):

Yahoo! stock information results (when searching for “Yahoo“):

Google stock information results (when searching for “Google“):

Yahoo! video results (when searching for “Jerry Springer“):

It’s nice to see Yahoo! use YouTube videos in the result pages (as you know YouTube is owned by Google).

Google video results (when searching for “Jerry Springer“):

Yahoo! local results and maps (when searching for “Hilton hotel New York“):

Google local results and maps (when searching for “Hilton hotel New York“):

Yahoo! specific results (when searching for “U2“):

Google specific results (when searching for “U2“):

Looks like Yahoo! is really catching up with Google when it comes to universal search…

Can we expect Google to add the number of RSS subscribers to the result pages in the future? After all they own Feedburner and up until today I don’t think they have used it yet. Suggestions? Google Analytics and the SERP’s…