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You may have thought that Google hadn't been making many waves in the webmaster world in the last few months and, apart from one or two exceptions, things certainly have been rather quiet. I guess you can put that down to Google's moves in the world of big business getting more attention than anything that's like to be of much immediate interest to Webmasters but over the last week or so all that has changed.

I talked yesterday about the changes that had occurred with Google's index shuffle. That certainly caused a number of us to catch our breath but that was just the prelude to last Thursday. That was the day that Google began to get a little vocal about the latest change to their search engine and, once again, there have definitely been some of us who have caught our breath because this has the potential to be serious.

Google Universal Search is definitely going to change the appearance of most search engine results pages and that is definitely going to have an affect on all of us. In the past when a surfer typed a term into Google's search box the results that they got generally reflected what Google knew about the sites on the Net that it had crawled.

The fact that Google had 13 other types of search engine out there that looked at things besides the Net was little known. It also had little impact on anyone because Google's Web Search was what almost everyone saw and what was returned when people searched. But now when people search on Google they won't just be getting results from Web Search.

Instead of getting results from just one of Google's search engines Google will be searching all 14 search engines and returning results that could include information from some of their lesser known search areas. For example, if you did a search for Tom Sawyer instead of just seeing results from Google's Web Search you may now see results from Google's Book Search, Google Video and any other information on their other search engines that Google may consider relevant and important.

If you think about it for a moment you will see the problem for webmasters like you and me. We've all been focused almost exclusively on Google Web Search and very few of us have any expertise in any of the other 13 search engines. Up until now, with that expertise in Google Web Search, we could have ranked on the first page for most search terms without too much trouble but now that is going to become more difficult.

Now instead of concentrating exclusively on Google Web Search we will have to start thinking seriously about Google Video, Google Blog Search, Google Images and all the other Google variations that are out there. And we need to be doing that because all those search engines could return results that will push us and our web pages right off the front page.

On one hand I can't help thinking that facing that level of competition and the need to add to our skill and knowledge base is the last thing we need to be doing. On the other hand though, I see the addition of all these other search engines as a real challenge that we should be happy to face. In fact even in adult there are a few of those smaller search engines that we should already be ranking well in.

If you've been reading my columns here and elsewhere over the last 12 months or so you will have seen me carrying on about blogs. If you have been doing something with blogs then you should already be in Blog Search. If you've been allowing Google Image Search to see your images then you will already have your foot in the door with Google Image Search.

Google Video is somewhere else that a few of webmasters are already making progress. Don't think that Google Video is only going to look at video that's stored on Google's servers either. Just remember that Google has bought YouTube so if you have some videos there perhaps it's time to go in and edit the titles etc. to make them more search engine friendly.

If you have a look at all of the 14 search engines that have now been integrated into Universal Search you will soon see that not all of them are ever likely to provide competition when it comes to adult terms. But don't discount them all entirely; look at each one carefully because there may well be several that can still be exploited even though they don't obviously deal in adult material.

At the same time you're looking at those that are not so obvious for adult be sure to look at the ones that are obvious targets for adult from all angles. There are always more than one way to achieve the results you want so make sure you have them all covered.

While you may be thinking that Universal Search has just made life for webmasters a whole lot more difficult don't let it overwhelm you. Instead it's really only giving us additional ways of getting some good rankings on the first search engine results page for some popular terms.

It's another challenge to overcome and winners always thrive on challenges.