Following the recent announcement by Microsoft that their Live Search engine will begin to display 'blended results' with maps or images included alongside relevant text, Yahoo have also now joined the club by presenting 'universal results' from a number of different search sources, ensuring that they also stay on track with the moves first made by Ask and Google.

AdWeek has reviewed the latest changes and the trend by the search engines to present more relevant results regardless of the media source. Quoting Jim Lanzone, the CEO of Ask, it appears that "Search used to be the ultimate bookmark finder. It's evolving into the navigational device for people's lives. The search experience is going to have a renaissance in the next few years."

The article considers the way that search advertising could start attracting brand advertisers in bigger number as it moves away from pure direct response traffic to the use of multimedia allowing companies to present a stronger brand message. As the use of 'universal search' results becomes more sophisticated, all the search engines will introduce new and sharper ways of generating relevant results that will also attract search advertisers and give optimisers more opportunities - and challenges - to achieve search visibility.