Yesterday I bloged about the deal between Univision and Google as potentially happening next month according to sources from the news article. Just today I notice that Univision.com has added a search box at the top of its portal saying "Optimized by Google" in Spanish. Why "optimized by" and not "powered by" beats me. In my opinion, I think "powered by" is more appropiate since Univision does not have any search technology to optimize for, it's all 100% Google's as far as I can see it.
From the portal's homepage the search function defaults to "Uniclave" (which their way of saying "keyword" like AOL's original marketing strategy) rather than search. This, of course, is intended for the company to keep the user as much as possible within the portal before it hits the outside world of search. A simple click of the radio button that says "Internet" and the user is ready for Google searches specially tailored for Univision. Also, if no keyword exists then it goes for a search on the web for pages in Spanish.
If the user chooses to do an actual search of the www then no matter what language the keyword phrase he or she uses it defaults to Spanish pages on the web as the first option. If the user changes a radio button to Internet (Inglés) then it searches in English pages on the web.
It's also interesting to notice that URLs also express Univision's domain, for example:
http://www.univision.com/buscar/buscar_resultados.jhtml?base=0&chid=1&locale=1&pgsz=10&referring_channel=1& referring_subchannel=12&schid=12&secid=0&type=basic& search_type=internet&query=comida+mexicana
The third radio button option it presents for its search box is to look for documents within Univision.com. When you do a search, for example ?mercado hispano? (without quotes) you will notice that there a no snippets, but rather a description of what's available on that page. I clicked on a listings to verify as a sample and the actual description from the search results does not even appear on the page nor in the code. Therefore, they must either be using Google Sitemaps or a direct feed. Company sources have informed me that its internal search is powered by software they license, not Google's technology.
Univision.com was signed up with Overture in January 2004. Unfortunately, the page with the story is down and I can?t find a copy of the press release. If anyone does, please send me a copy, I would appreciate it very much. Anyway, I imagine that it was for a short period of time since now it?s clear that they have a deal to serve paid search from Google Adwords.
There are no details of the deal that I know of, but this is an outstanding move by Univision.com?s executive team and a great step forward for Google. I wish them both great success with their partnership.
Now, I wonder what they will be doing together for Video Search, since Univision is the largest TV media producer for the U.S. Hispanic market? It will be exciting to see what these two may be cooking up. You're welcome to join the thread at SEW Forums to discuss more on Univision.com goes LIVE with Search Powered by Google.
