There's been lots of discussion about universal search (aka "blended" search) results in Google over the past several months but I rarely see a true example of its use.  I guess that I perform a lot of B2B type of searches and the blended search concept is currently moretargeted at the consumer. But last week, I was searching for information on the new Will Smith movie - I Am Legend - and was presented with a classic example of universal search.

As you can see, there are several elements that go beyond the traditional web page results:

1. Film/Movie Information - at the top (below the sponsored listing), you can see that there is a link to the movie trailer and a box to enter your post code so that you can locate cinemas and film times.
2. News - below the film box is a section of news results
3. Web Pages - then you get a few web results (50% of which are wikipedia)
4. YouTube - you then get a YouTube link

So this is what universal search is about - search results that go beyond web pages (film reviews, news, video, etc) and some web pages. 

The good news for web marketers and SEO folks is that there are still 9 web page results in this SERP.  The film and news sections are being provided as part of Google's OneBox functionality that is displayed above web results.  It is only the YouTube video that is occupying a web page result. 

A lot of the fuss about Universal Search has been about the diminishing number of rankings that will be made available to web pages.  This may happen in some situations, but it was useful to see how a lot of the additional information is being provided by Google without the need to replace the 10 web results.