March 6th, 2008 admin
Okay, third post in 3 hours. But this one is particularly interesting. Follow my customer journey on this one;
Customer plans to buy a Satellite Navigation system from Maplin; and therefore searches for ‘Maplin’ in Google.
Customer searches for Maplin, then fills in the satnav into google search extra.
(Click image to see the adsense ads).
The maplin satnav results show google adsense on the side, showing competitive prices. You WILL bleed customers here.
Terrible. I see amazon has already opted out of the search.. how long until everyone doe
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March 6th, 2008 admin
Okay, so i’ve calmed down slightly. We’ve had a lot of inhouse discussion here about the ramifications of the search box for brand, and what it means. How is google planning to use this?
One opinion here is that this is another attack similar to the November Florida changes in that it is an affiliate attack, and Google plans to reintroduce Froogle in the way that they did several years ago - directly involved in the search text. To quote my colleague exactly;
“My view is that they are ultimately trying to fill the first page of natural listings with these site search boxes for product searches, with the objective of adding maybe a tick box option where Google will compare the product being searched for on all participating sites thereby functioning as a comparison engine.”
Now, i’m not too sure on this one. Is this a mess that google really needs to get into? The ramifications of a censorship approach like this to increase their own products competitiveness is something that google is yet to do; although they could have done it years ago, and become incredibly powerful because of it.
Google blog has posted on the issue. They appear to be confirming what I thought the search feature would be used for. If someone searches for a big brand name, it is highly likely that they want to investigate further into the page. Therefore; it’s googles discretion whether or not to enable the feature for a site based on click through performance. Similar to the top spot occupation for ppc campaign - it only appears if your site is that relevant.
What does this mean moving forward? An extention away from brand term would probably be the next logical step. If a natural listing gets an incredibly high click through rate on a generic search - why not add an additional search box due to its relevancy? This will eventually be the holy grail of generic search results, if it is rolled out to generic terms.
How about placing this feature on extremely high click through rate performing ppc adverts? I don’t think this will happen, but it would make things very very interesting in the future..
Google IS willing to mess with the natural listing display.
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March 6th, 2008 admin
So, the natural listings in google have another google search box now, when you search for brand term. A quick search for Wikipedia will show the search box appearing. However this search box only appears when the site is ranking first (and possibly only for brand); is this a sitemap option..?
It is currently running for Wikipedia, John Lewis, Amazon and probably hundreds more.
Try it for yourself; google search for wikipedia.
Edit- Upon further examination, it is only appearing for brand term searches for major retailer & large companies (microsoft, tesco.. etc)
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