Attending this years Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose, Chris from Natural Search Blog explains reports on what Google Engineer David Bailey has to say on the topic of universal search. As he explains:

[...] Universal Search actually runs a number of queries across all of their vertical search engines in parallel, and then they choose how to rank the top results returned by each of them when deciding what items to display 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc in the search results. [...]

One major piece of advice [David Bailey] gave to companies who wish to rank well in the new Universal Search paradigm really stood out to me: he recommended that companies look to diversify the types of content they have out there in promoting their products and sites — to work to have content in each of the major vertical areas now, including Images, local business listings in Google Maps, video, news, etc. [...] The correlation to ranking well in each of the many verticals is now translating directly into good rankings in the main web search results pages. This same holds true for the other search engines such as Yahoo! and Ask as well, though perhaps to a slightly lesser degree.

Best Practice is to now diversify your web presence and work on having good content to represent you in as many of the various verticals as makes sense for your company.

It is precisely in this vain that I asserted that video search can effect reputation management. It is just one of many verticals that Google will be scraping for relevant results to display on the universal search page.

More to the point, however, it is a tangible incentive to accept the premise that the new media is multi media par excellence. For all intents and purposes, the fifth estate and tertiary advertising media are the conventional/mainstream media. Online media, then, is new media -- for all intents and purposes. The thing about online portals, however, is that they can feature a variety of media all at the same time.

Unlike print, radio, or television, online media outlets are not in any way restricted in the range of media they can employ at any given moment. It therefore makes perfect sense that they employ text, audio, and visual media simultaneously. Not only does this broaden their audience appeal, but provided that the proper meta information is there, it also broadens their SEO potential. They can rank in a number of different verticals and, as a result, gain a better overall ranking in the SERPs on a "universal search."

As user get more accustomed to multi-media portals, moreover, both the perspective as a media consumer and media creator (UGC), the expectations they have of search results will evolve accordingly. What they deem more relevant in a lot of regards will be results from more authoritative sources. If the user is accustomed to a more multi-media experience, then, it follows that portal that offer a more eclectic media experience will be regarded with more authority.

If the advent of personal search tells us anything, it's that Google is in the business of delivering results that the user deems most relevant. It only makes sense, then, that universal search is going to be the future point of departure for many users setting out to find authoritative and/or relevant results to their search queries.