Google just changed search. Again. Four ways.

Written on 17th January 2009                                                                                                              9 COMMENTS
David Petherick, Contributing Editor, United Kingdom

Search never stays still. Neither does The Next Web Blog. Today, we found out that Google, where search is the core of its business, have added a link to new experimental features to its home page, which show options that can be added to the ’standard’ search.

The most dramatic of these is probably ‘Alternate views for search results‘ which, due to its nature, gives you different search results and rankings in different views of the same search query. So Search Experts take note: Page 1 of Google now has at least four different results!. Your site can be #1 in one type of search, but be invisible in others.

The standard Google search results page now also has “News about search term” appended to your search results as you can see below.

Google’s New ‘Alternate View’ Search Types

It is worth taking a look at this new feature for searches that include:-

• Search Results in Timelines [try this]
• Search Results on Maps [try this]
• Search Results in ‘Info Views’ which allow further refinement ‘on the fly’ [try this]
• One-click returns you to ‘Standard’ List View

You can obtain these views immediately using the standard google search interface by adding “view:map” “view:timeline” or “view info” following your search term – so rather than a search for ‘the next web’ you search for “the next web view:timeline”.

I’d recommend you check out these new search views, and also ensure that your site’s metadata is structured to ensure you appear in these new formats of search results.

There are also three other experimental search features at present –

• SearchWiki with sound – when you remove a result from your personal results, toy can have a sound effect play along with the animation whenever you remove a result. The sound is recorded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
• Keyboard shortcuts – use your keyboard to navigate results – so J Selects the next result, K Selects the previous result, etc.
• Accessible View – As you navigate, items are magnified for easier viewing. If you use a screen reader or talking browser, the relevant information is spoken automatically as you navigate.

Google continues to innovate and to develop its search technology, and in my view these new experimental features show that it’s still the very best at delivering search results. It’s also a wake-up call for you to ensure that the information on your web pages is given proper semantic structure – or meaning – because that will be a crucial differentiatiator as the amount of data online increases.

(Screen shots created from UK access to Google.com by David Petherick using plasq’s Skitch)

alternative search, experimental, google, Search engines, search results, seo

9 Comments »

Google Insights: first spark of iPhone hype in September 2005

Written on 6th August 2008                                                                                                              0 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Google has launched a new tool that helps to gain insight in search terms, called – not surprisingly – Google Insights for Search. Google’s Trevor Claiborne wrote earlier today that the product was designed with the advertiser in mind:

It provides more flexibility and functionality for advertisers and marketers to understand search behavior, and adds some cool new features like a world heat map to graphically display search volume and regional interest.

Even though the service is aimed at people who have devoted their life to marketing, it doesn’t mean a blogger can’t play around with it as well. I thought of a nice search term, and – again not surprisingly, came up with the iPhone. And not just because an Apple story drives in clicks (somebody accused Om Malik of doing this).

Trinidad and Tobago and Hong Kong: iPhone countries

So here are some surprising facts:

• The first time a fair amount of people searched for the shiny object was in September 2005. Were that some iPhone visionaries? Or a secret Apple team looking for similarities?
• People from Hong Kong and Trinidad and Tobago hardly search for anything else but the iPhone.
• Lebanese iPhone fanboys rather have an iPhone for free

Apple, google, Google Insights for Search, iphone, marketing, search results, shiny object

No Comments »

Google Heatmap: what do we look at?

Written on 22nd April 2008                                                                                                              3 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

We are looking at a presentation by Stephan Spencer, a web marketing expert and founder and president of interactive agency Netconcepts. His presentation is about search engine optimization.

One of the slides caught my eye because it is both beautiful, inspiring and educational. It shows a heatmap of where people actually click on a Google result page. What we can learn from this is how extremely important it is to be the number one result for any search and even for paid ads on Google. Interestingly enough the first result, which is watched and clicked most, is a paid result.

heatmap, san francisco, search results, Stephan Spencer, web20expo

3 Comments »

Google launches new search result views

Written on 28th January 2008                                                                                                              1 COMMENT
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

Google just introduced a new set of experimental views for search results. You can test the new views yourself right now. Google is always experimenting with new features aimed at improving the search experience and once in a while they test them on the general audience. If they get enough positive feedback the experiments become standard.

Today they give us ‘Alternate views for search results’ which can show results in a timeline, on a map, or in context of other information types. The timeline view work best for searches related to people, companies, events and places. Try it yourself with this example: ‘space exploration‘.

Keyword suggestions are pretty much what you would expect. A sort of ‘auto-complete’ function for Google. Try it here: http://www.google.com/webhp?q=google&esrch=GoogleSuggestBeta

Keyboard shortcuts is by far the most exciting new feature. This is going to be a huge timesaver for a lot of people. Here are the new keyboard shortcuts and a demo:

Also new are Left-hand search navigation and Right-hand contextual search navigation. If you want to see additional results of a particular content type, just click a link in the left-hand search navigation. Similar to the left-hand search navigation, right-hand contextual search navigation allows you to search deeper in a particular type of content or to search related terms – but from the right side of the page.

From: Official Google Blog

experimental, google, search results

1 Comment »