A NEW FACE FOR GOOGLE?
- Apr. 26, 2006
There is this old adage that everything is new in spring: new love, new blossoms, and new hay fever symptoms. Of course, there are always new reruns and new excuses to do nothing other than sit on the couch and watch the play-offs...
For me, spring means cleaning out the gutters that I never got around to in the fall; pulling out all the relics of the Spanish Inquisition that my wife calls gardening tools...
For me, spring means back pains from painting, weeding, planting, cleaning, and whatever else I am told to do on my two days off to recreate her vision of a Martha Stewart New England cottage. All my neighbors, out in their yards too; equally pained, equally looking for some means of escape...
Just like my staged reconstruction of my wife's bucolic vision, Google is in the midst of making some design changes to its Search. They're not alone, Yahoo! has been doing this since winter, and, more than likely, the new Ask led MSN hybrid will be ramping up soon; fortunately, they have deep enough pockets to hire a landscaping crew.
Over the last week or so, there have been random appearances of a new Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page), and today, Google officially announced that it has been testing some new ways of sorting and presenting results.
What’s new?
- The most striking difference is the addition of a Google side bar with relevancy rankings (see screenshot below). Instead of having links to all of the Google properties above the search box, Google is experimenting with moving them to the top left hand corner and using a ranking bar similar to Page Rank so that users can quickly identify if relevant results are in Google Local, Images, or Froogle. This has an immediate visual shift, in lifting more results above the fold, this after so many innovations that have moved the results further down the page.
- Another innovation - Let's say that the first 2 organic listings really aren't relevant to what you were looking for; the new Google SERP allows users to identify non-relevant links so that they do not appear in any repeat searches. This innovation requires that users have a Google account, once you are logged in Google is able to track your preferences. Making it more and more necessary to have an account with them, and once you have one Google tool, you will want to collect them all!
- If you are doing a broad search for a general term like "jobs", new refining fields are served to help the user filter by location and/or profession. Basically, Google is attempting to offer fields for refining search parameters instead of continually presenting useless results that do not match the user's semantic map.
- The real-estate for sponsored ads is shuffled, where top sponsored are displayed at the bottom of the page (beyond the fold) like MSN.
Test Page Old Page Why bother?
These experiments bring up two questions: 1) How far will Google go to try to create perfectly relevant results that are targeted to the individual user and at what cost? and, 2) Are these tests at all reliable?
Question 1
Recently, Google acquired the "shrouded in mystery" Orion algorithm. I doubt that these tests are a working model of this mysterious equation, but there is surely a scope correlation. Besides buying the technology simply to maintain their competitive advantage, it seems that every new Google purchase has something to do with further refining their ability to give users the most relevant results.
We have long been proponents of how semantic mapping and thin-slicing affects search behavior. We have even done exhaustive eye-tracking studies to map out the Google Golden Triangle and Yahoo!/MSN F-scan patterns. And our conclusions were that all of these factors impacted a user's perceived relevance in the listings on a SERP. With this new design, Google has shifted the prime page real-estate to the left and put links to its properties straight dab in the middle of where most users first fixate on a page.
Now, I highly doubt that Google will progress with the new sponsored layout, seeing as their business is based primarily on an ad revenue model, but I wonder about the effects of this real estate shift. Will users naturally shift their first fixation point because, as is often stated, Google sets the standard? Or, will more attention be given to all of Google's other properties, expanding their market reach? Isn't that what they are doing with the current Google Base testing that is scaring every single newspaper publisher in the country?
I’m all for giving more relevant listings, but I question how effective any additional steps to search will be. Whereas all of us early adopters are probably very intrigued by this negative step of checking off non-relevant listings, how friendly will the masses be to this extra step? Will they ever use it? Not only are we expecting people to click through to non-relevant results, but to go back to the SERP and tell Google not to display those listings again; or interpret from the descriptions that they are not even worth clicking on and telling Google as much. I'm not sure that any additional steps in search will ever be successful. Plus, is Google then going to use this information to assess ranking? Probably. Is Google then admitting that its listings are not very relevant? I won't answer that one.
Question 2
Not particular to Google specifically, but how effective is random testing like this at giving reliable results? We are giving users familiar with a specific design something new and different, and expecting honest and qualified reactions. Whenever I see testing like this, I'm reminded of the time my wife came home with a new haircut and asked me how it looked. It's not exactly the same, but this kind of random testing has two major flaws. First, it ignores the user shock and the effect it has on their behavior. Second, it doesn't adequately account for user re-orientation (or SEMs need to write interesting articles, and maybe that is the reason Google is doing this in the first place).
I, like everybody, look forward to the day that Search Engines give me listings that are exactly what I want - as if they were some carnival fortuneteller with a byline straight into my head. But when that day eventually arrives, it won't really be "search" anymore; it will be "tell", and that doesn't roll off the tongue as well.
Tom Abramowski
&
Rick Tobin
Search Engine Marketers
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