Google Releases a New Search (within Search)
I don’t know many web users (typical web users) who would goto a search engine and type in “red wine site:classicwines.com” to find red wine search results at ClassicWines.com. The reason web pages show up in Google, is because Google “indexes” those pages. This enables a site to have different pages show for different results in the search engine.
Just this past week Google has introduced a “search-within-search” featured to allow users to further hammer down results.
Many publishers are up in arms about how this can effect their bottom line, while some are open to this change. Many publishers and shopping sites what you to use our internal site search function for multiple reasons.
1. It gives you more contextually relevant results and display whether be recommendations or advertising.
2 More often than not you are getting real time results.
a. for example, every page on a site adding new products daily (i.e. ClassicWines.com) may not be entirely indexed by Google in real-time thereby throwing off your results. Results and inventory can change on a moments notice and you want your search to have the flexibility to reflect that to your visitors.
3. Google will be showing you ads from our competitors while you browse our search results (well, technically Google’s search results of our site). Anti-competitive measures please Google?
4. Publishers do not have full control over the accuracy of results in this scenario. While most sites optimize for Google, search features are usually customized and geared to be performed internally on the site. Discussing usability is a whole other topic.
5. Google has not “mastered” the content of all sites and many site search engines are “homemade” by publishers to deal with their unique data set.
Amazon.com is one site that took action and asked Google to remove the search box from their results. While initially I am intrigued as to the overall market value (especially for end users) - I am looking at this from the eyes of a publisher who has invested time and technology in a site search featured geared to be a positive experience for our site users. We even track our users behavior and preferences to continually update our search features and indexing habits. While I love Google’s search and indexing, no one knows our clients better than we do and their search behavior which we cater to for a living.
I am interested to see how this plays out. If this search box popped under any of my sites today, I wouldn’t mind, but appreciate it as a gesture to allow me to more accurately measure the results. Open to the challenge Google?
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