Along with the search results for most location-specific queries, Google provides this list of geo-specific search results, which they determine from the keywords in the query and the geographic location of the searcher.

Local Business Results on Google Web Search

The local business results within the universal search results are quite extensive and inclusive. Earlier, they used to appear only when the user included a specific location in his query, but for some time now, Google provides these local business results even for queries without a specific local qualification to the keyword if the query is deemed to be typically meant for localised searches, such as “nearest pizza”.

This universal search result includes detailed information about the businesses in the given location, including phone numbers and direct links to the website.

Due to this addition, the number of referrals to Internet directory services has shown a marked downward trend.

A study of the progress graph of various internet yellow pages, including those in the U.K., Canada and Australia, shows this downward trend.

Decline in percentage visits from search engines

The graph above charts the percentage of visits to the leading UK directory assistance services’ websites that came from a search engine. Over the past 3 months, most of these services have seen a fall of 1% to 8% in the percentage of traffic being referred from search.

While this is bad for these local directories, it is certainly a great convenience for Google’s users, as they do not need to go from one page to another, to find answers to their queries.

It is, of course, possible for these directory assistance sites to fight back, if they are innovative and put in a lot more effort. In fact, some directory services such as Yelp, Zillow and ServiceMagic have managed to maintain steady growth internationally in spite of Google’s onslaught.

In the past, individual video results occupied the place of an antire search listing, and were  accompanied by a title, a short, one-line snippet pulled from the YouTube page for that video, the duration and average user ratings for the video, as can be seen alongside. This is still the predominant listing format for most universal search results.

However, some searches seem to now yield a single result with two videos placed side-by-side, as seen in the screenshot below. Both the videos are still pulled from YouTube, and both are accompanied by a short title, but are without any description snippet or ratings information and instead just contain information about the duration of the video.

While both videos in the screenshot above do seem equally relevant to the query, that does not seem to be the sole influencing factor for such a layout of the results, as the two videos in the first example shown above-right are also equally relevant in fact, but are still listed one below the other.

It is not clear at present how Google determines whether videos should be presented in this layout or another. It may be something to do with the currenct nature of the query or it may be that both videos score the exact same relevance points according to the Google algorithm and can therefore be clubbed together, even though they are varied in content and come from different useer accounts.