Google Universal Search Results Bid For Placement And May Be Influenced By Clicks

In the latest Search Off the Record podcast, Gary Illyes from Google spoke about how Google Universal Search works and more importantly, how Google decides which vertical search feature to rank in what position in the main search results.

Gary Illyes explained why sometimes featured snippets show up at the top, or maybe news articles, or images, videos and so forth. In short, each of these vertical indexes bids for its position within the main web results. And how does Google decide to show images versus news versus videos? Illyes said that Google sees what users click on and if, for a specific query, more users click on more images, Google knows users want to see the images carousel instead of a news carousel.

One caveat: This does not mean Google ranks specific and individual documents, images, web results, etc. based on click data. However, which universal element Google may show in the web results, can be influenced by clicks. So, Google does not use click data to rank a specific image or a specific video or a specific web page, but it can use click data to, for example, show the image carousel box here or there on the web results page.