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Sometimes I think my brain must spend most of the day out to lunch and somehow I just go on functioning on auto-pilot. Sometimes it seems that I go on like that for weeks or maybe even months at a time. At least that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it because without an excuse like that I have reason to have missed something important about Universal Search.

In case your brain has been out lunch for about as long as mine has let me first tell you what Universal Search is all about. Google is known around the world for its web search engine and just about everyone who has access to the Net has used it at one time or another. All you have to do is type a word or a term into the search box on Google's home page and wait while Google searches the data it has collected and returns the URLs of all the web pages that Google thinks is relevant to your search.

What many people didn't realize was that Google had a heap of other search engines too but they searched things other than web pages. They searched maps, images, books and a whole heap of other things and until Universal Search came along they were completely separate to the web search engine that everyone has used.

With Universal Search Google has integrated all those separate search engines into one and now if you do a search for a term you're likely to see links to images, maps and even video mixed in with the URLs of the websites that Google thought were relevant to the word or term you searched for.

Now at first glance I thought that was something that was not all that favorable for us Webmasters. Under the old system there would be ten websites listed on the first page of Google's results page and it was hard enough to get onto that first page but under the new system you would have even less chance of making that first page.

Under the new system you would be fighting with those video clips, images and maps and, depending on the word or term, there might only be five or six spots left for URLs on that page instead of the ten that were there before Universal Search came along.

It was about that time that my brain went to lunch and never really came back. Even though Steve pointed out that a video clip he had put up on Youtube for one of our clients was now hitting the front page of Google for a very important term I still didn't see any advantage there for Webmasters.

What makes this even more embarrassing for me is the fact that I've been in adult for many years now and adult is all about images. We know what impact that images can have on our marketing message, we know that people look at images before they look at other things ... but I never made the connection between images and search engine results pages.

But now, thanks to an article I've just read in Search Insider the penny has dropped, the light bulb has come on and my brain is back from lunch ... although probably not for very long.

In the past I saw the images and maps that Google returned as a threat and something that was going to push my sites off the front page of Google for terms that I thought were important but not anymore. Now I'm beginning to see some advantages in having images appear on search results pages and it all has to do with where the surfers look.

The author of the article referenced some eye tracking studies that his business had conducted both before and after Universal Search came along. Those studies showed that before Universal Search people started at the top of a results page and looked down the first few entries.

As they scanned those entries their eyes would drift out along the lines text for each entry in what he described as an F pattern. After scanning a few lines on a few entries they would often change their search terms if they didn't find what they were looking for.

After Universal Search came along the way people scanned a results page from Google changed. Instead of starting at the top of the page and working their way down the page in that F pattern an image on the results page would catch their eye. Instead of starting at the top of the page they'd hit on the image and start there.

If the detail around the image didn't give them the information that they were looking for they would not go back to the top of the page but instead look at the entries immediately above and below the image that had first caught their attention. Instead of an F shaped track the pattern of looking at a page changed to what the author described as an E.

Think about it for a little while and you'll see some interesting possibilities there and even if you can't get an image onto the front page you might find that being on top of the results page isn't quite as important as it once was.