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A New Tool From Google Worries Brand-Name Sites
Google has quietly introduced a new feature, called search-within-search, that is alarming some big-name Web publishers and retailers. They worry that users will be siphoned away through ad sales to competitors. What Google is doing is offering a secondary search option if the user initially searches explicitly for one of the brand-name destinations that Google has identified, such as "Best Buy." This secondary search lets users refine their query entirely within the pages of the desired site — but using Google's search, not the site's, and showing Google ads on the result pages, quite possibly ads from competitors. "Analysts generally praise the feature as helping users save steps, but for Web publishers and retailers, there are trade-offs... 'Google is showing a level of aggressiveness with this that's just not needed,' said [one Internet consultant]... Take, for instance, a [test where] users of Google searched The Washington Post and were given a secondary search box. Those who typed 'jobs' into that second box saw related results for The Post's employment pages, but the results were bordered by ads for competing employment sites like CareerBuilder or Monster.com. So even though users began the process by stating their intention to reach The Post, Google's ads steered at least some of them to competitors. Similar situations arose when users relied on Google to search nytimes.com."
When google sends them traffic (for free). Besides, I think that it is unlikely many people will use google to search individual inventories. Maybe I'm naive, but I routinely choose not to search a site with google (if there is an option).
I record my sleeptalking
www.copernic.com that already has search within the results
If they don't want Google to index their publicly available pages, they can use robots.txt. End of story.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
There must be some way for Google to allow web designers and retailers to give exclusions, just like they do with Adsense. It's a good idea and practice, but hopefully the bugs are worked out.
The Computations of AdamR
http://www.adamreyher.com
'Google is showing a level of aggressiveness with this that's just not needed,' WTF is aggressiveness? Why can't anyone use 'aggression' anymore in the news? Maybe Im just cranky and I need to feed my hungriness.
I can see why some would be upset over this "new" feature (really just a nice automatic way of site:www.example.com) but Google's search is so often better than the actual site's that I find it hard to get mad. Try searching for a wikipedia article using the internal search, then try google's. Especially for stuff like typos and broad subjects, google's search is much better.
The "site:" search has been around nearly as long as Google itself. All Google did was make it easier to use, and now companies are complaining about this "new" tool?
Search within search? Sounds like search within site to me. I think the article should be titled "Google adds ads to their search within site feature." They already have a search within site feature. It's on their page and on their toolbar. Btw if case you've never used it, IT SUCKS. It is seriously awful. If the target website is set up in a way that google can't understand, you'll get no results for anything. And sometimes you won't find something with search within site that you will find by looking around manually. Add ads to it and even less people are going to bother with it.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
I could do a search with "site:www.bestbuy.com" for years now. wtf you talking about new feature?
Maybe this will get web administrators to have more friendly sites. I hate trying to find a link on a site and being forced to go back to google to search something like "jobs site:www.washingtonpost.com". Too many sites are just hard to navigate causing a definite need for this new google tool.
Data is data. If you are like me, you won't be seeing the ads anyway. When I'm searching data, complex searches reveal the best results in most cases. Being able to search within results is a form of complex search and can be specified by the searcher to start with, Google has simply made this easier. If Google is doing something bad, people are welcome to not have their data indexed by Google. Anyone can search your site via Google and present their own ads next to it. Yes Google is the 800 lb search gorilla, but get real here.
No, I do not think Google is beyond doing evil. I just haven't seen them do any yet.
No matter how technology changes what data we see and how we see it someone is going to be inconvenienced. I am sincerely hoping the US government is the next to be inconvenienced by large amounts of publicly available data. If a few website owners get caught in the mix... meh.
Talk to the buggy makers and shoe cobblers, I'm certain that they will have great sympathy for you.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Presenting users with choices amongst related businesses.
Oh the aggression. How dare an indexing company make it easier for consumers to view multiple sources for related queries to increase the revenue of their longstanding business model. Removing means of retaining "captive audience" style market research and manipulation is definitely not needed by anyone!
I believe the response for this as a current common colloquialism is "cry more, noobs".
Ice Cream has no bones.
Would a search of 'google' result in infinite recursion?
what ads?
I like to avoid confrontations..... I don't see either
i think the problem is google is essentially using someone elses content with their advertisements. and without their permission. they did not sign up for googles ad program.
If the brand name is offering a better deal, why be concerned....
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
indexing their content in the first place. As I see it turn around it fair play. How many law suites has google had to defend against from print media. If you ask me it fair play
no matter how good it is, it is human nature always wants to make things better
Google deals in information. Copyright controls the expression of information, not the information itself. Will we see further abuses of copyright law as information providers try to shoehorn the information contained in their websites into the protection provided by copyright law?
This quietly introduced feature shows a level of aggressivity that is unparalleled and supertastic in scale! Bestbuy will find it difficult to compete at the same level as Google and an official documented protest is expected to be filed due to the fact this feature encourages users to explore alternatives which will be detrimental to the outlets bottom line. There has been comments made suggesting the FTC may investigate Googles practices for being anti-competitive but there is a competing rumor that that would be just silly and something akin to an oxymoron. The prevailing opinion is that people are just crying over a pretty nifty feature as per usual, but the individuals who share that opinion are those that would not bother to document anything like that so its currently unmeasurable making the exact aggressiveness hard to calculate ( but we are pretty sure we don't have an algorithm to contain it )
Thanks for pointing out said feature though, I appreciate it, it brightened my morning a little bit.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
I've been using site:www.example.com for years.
tagged crymeariver
are Google deceiving search users into visiting the sites of advertisers? Google ads tend to be fairly obvious as Google ads, if they were doing something sneaky like inserting adverts into search results, then that would be different IMO.
Users want choices. So haters (here: lock-in-loving corporate fascists) can go fuck themselves.
The "problem" as stated is that when I search for option A I will also be presented with options B and C instead of being contained within option A.
There are countries for the latter sort of scenario. Most of us luckily do not live in one, and most that do would happily not.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Ah, yet another class of ads to locate, rate, and filter. Now Adblock and CustomizeGoogle need to be updated.
We probably should look into rating the advertisers with AdRater. Outright ad blocking seems overkill for this class of ad, but rating doesn't interfere with user searches.
The revolt against excessive advertising is growing. Sao Paulo, Brazil eliminated outdoor advertising last year. All of it.
Since they were negative about GOOG, they'll have to be modded down to -5.
How is it different from the users using "site:domain.com" ? Instead of having it under advanced options, now they have it as a link/icon...
Mod points are a dangerous tool. Abuse them wisely.
Google cannot aggregate content belonging to others to make money. They do that already, but its unethical to show google ads in other content, without their permission. Suggestions of not getting your site indexed by Google is not practical. Everybody knows the power of Google. It is another MS in making story. Though, they are good at what they are doing.
I often use google to find product pages instead of using the site's search, anyway. Sometimes it's just takes fewer clicks.
If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.
So, a tool allows customers to more quickly find information on a company's website. That's bad. The customer should instead get frustrated and have to wade through lots of crap to find the information. No wonder I hate more and more modern websites. I love Google's site: feature and use it all the time to cut through the crap. Also, Google often shows top-level pages under a search result, for example searching for slashdot gives several news sections as sub links under the first result. Of course a company is always free to put up a robots.txt that tells all search engines not to index their site, if they are worried about customers finding useful information there via a search.
Hmm, maybe redundant but site: has been around for a while. Perhaps the "retailers" are more scared that it's more accessible to the people they target (a.k.a idiots).
On an off topic note, does the internets explode if I type in "site:google.com google"?
Who are the morons who even click on google ads?! I've become blind to them and don't even notice them except for the #1 spot in search results.
You can already do searches like this using the "site:" function. For example searching only slashdot on google is easy by adding "site:slashdot.org" to the end of your search.
Even though Google has this function, however, it is not completely useful. Their index isn't updated instantaneously so often it lags behind days or even weeks. Polling sites on the internet is too much and if a provider notices excessive queries from Google it is pretty easy to limit the number of times they can hit your site or even block them all together. So they'd only be doing themselves in if they went too far with keeping their index updated.
Another thing is the Google index method is good for certain things but horrible for others. Say for example you were searching for information regarding a specific model of a TV. Unless you know the exact model number or part number, Google isn't going to give you an answer very fast. In most cases your better off going to the site and finding it yourself.
Another thing that really throws Google off is mailing lists. Anytime I search for freebsd things, I always get a bunch of results from random posts in mailing lists that are something completely irrelevant to what I wanted. In fact, the first page of results is often a little random because the algorithm didn't account for the structure of a mailing list and the purpose of the mailing list.
Google's solution is still probably better than the competition, but there are some pretty big rough edges that they seem to have no idea on how to approach. Some of them are pretty mediocre or not even useful like their shopping search (was called froogle).
people who leech money out of the internet disturbed by innovation that helps web users
So basically, these companies are crying over the fact that, if you search on a term that gives you this extra site: search box, that maybe you'll see ads from competitors? Despite the fact that the primary search results that you'll get will ALL be from the company's site?
BOO FUCKING HOO
So Google has made site: more easily accessible to the average user. Big fucking whoop. These companies can go pound sand as far as I'm concerned. Who the hell clicks on the sponsored links anyway?
FC Closer
Unless I am missing something, it would appear that the "Sponsored Links" section that everyone is complaining about along the right side of the page disappears when the "site:" keyword is used. It would appear that this mountain is now not even a mole hill.
I did google for "catholic" and Google did not offer me to consider switching to some other competitive religion.
This ought to be a wake-up call to businesses running a site: update your search features to work. Too often I find a site's own search box useless, it either doesn't return good results or tries to route me through what the site operator wants me to see instead of to the pages I want to see. Google's search probably won't. Not even a contest between them, far as I'm concerned. If the site doesn't like that, then they need to fix their search function.
...I search for google! I want to search within google's site!
All this feature does is offer the site: operator through the use of a new search box under the original result.
It's not a "new feature" in terms of what it can do, this has been available for ages. It's just making it easier for people who didn't know how to do it, who no longer have to click on "Advanced Search" or learn to type "site:"
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
This feature is old. Some more free pr for google.
Neither is the problem new. If you place google ads on your site google can put links to competitors in their ad space.
This is an interesting case study for UI though. Google basically enhanced their UI to be more user friendly, and got a reaction from it. Goes to show how naive google is about UI. Keep It Simple Stupid has gotten them here, but with all the new features available, they haven't done much to make any of them that accessible or easier to use.
google's providing a service to the user doing the search.
users are free to come and go from a site as they please, they are not the property of any web site.
the sooner site owners realise that trying to lock-in users to their site just pisses people off, the better off they (and the users) will be.
You could always do this using the "site:" modifier, say you want to search bestbuy.com for memory, the query would be
site:bestbuy.com memory
Done.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Whilst I'm not attempting to RTFA and just going by the summary, it sounds like nothing more than what I've always been doing with "site:".
As an end user, if I can type in a query and get appropriate (if expanded) search results that give me the results I want... more power to the google!
tough luck to those other wankers.
I'm an individual! Just like everyone else!
>How dare an indexing company make it easier for consumers to view multiple sources for related queries to increase the revenue of their longstanding business model.
I would care if I paid the fuckers a fee to bring those customers to my web site.
Sure, the site: option has been around for a while but it's not been very prominent and/or easy to use.
A Google Ads customer now has to pay more more time to keep the competition off the site one more time.
A smart person can tell by now how this is going to work (see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/18/when_google_does_evil/). A comments which quotes an insider:
"We know for a fact - because we know what happened at Overture - that when a quarter runs short, you turn the knob and more money comes in," Herring says. "That happens all the time at Overture, and I'm sure it happens at Google. Why wouldn't it? Like you said, it's a publicly traded company."
Yes, not a Google insider, but theirs being a very closed system do you actually believe that they already don't turn (or tune) the knob?
I'm fine with the feature since I don't advertise with Goo, I don't use Google at all (I use Scroogle.org and other sites) and I don't care what they do, but if I were a Google Ads customer I certainly wouldn't be happy about this and would be looking at other options.
Always nice to see some people panicking over something that happens and then not show where the actual panick originated.
The original article is most likely this one with a link to some sample.
You can try out comapnies yourselves. bwm does nothing. Nasa gives a result. wikipedia as well.
This is all on the Google site. I have not yet found a company site that uses Google (payed, not free) and get the seconday search.
What they do on their own site is their business. If they would do it on a site of one of their customers without asking, that might indeed upset them.
As far as I can see the secondary popup happens only to companies who are already customer and do have such a searchengine on their site anyway.
So instead of doing a search on google, find the site, click on that site and then do the 'search site with google' you do the search, then do the search and then get the results from that specific site. Good for Google as it can server more adds. Bad for Googles customers, as they do get lesser visitors.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You missed the point.
The issue is that people are paying money to Google (Google Ads) to bring users to their Web site.
Once it becomes easy to put another layer of (competitors') ads on the publisher's Web site, if the publisher can't opt out and if they want to keep competitors' ads from being prominently displayed on their own web site they will have to pay for ads one more time (and this is their own web site). To add insult to injury this time the "optimized" Google ad machine can ask for a significantly higher price than for the same ad placed on the Google Web site.
If there's no opt-out, the feature is bad deal for everyone buying ads from Google.
Yes, they can switch to another ad spammer and make other changes, but that costs money and resources. Goo's constantly changing EULAs and short announcements don't help (again, this is done on purpose so that they can milk out more people for longer time). Hehe, good luck to all the suckers who do business with them.
See no evil.
While it's very clever to say to use "robots.txt", it doesn't really help. If you have a well laid out site, that has been made as searchable via Google as possible, then it's not particularly clever to prevent Google from indexing the site. Thus, robots.txt isn't really a solution for those people.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
1. This is just a nice UI to sticking "site:example.com"in the search terms (something many consumers don't know how to do)
2. Most sites' internal search engines suck balls, don't work at all, or even don't exist.
3. The consumer is already using Google, and these companies go out of their way to get the pages and products listed and ranked well in the SERPs; suddenly they complain when Google makes it even easier for people to find things on their sites?
I smell a red herring.
Adapt or Die.
There's always the BDSM market, and I hear they're paying a premium for quality work!
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Want Goggle to search my site!
But only the parts I really, really want.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
i'm looking for a job, but only in the washington post. wah!
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
Site search is my main reason for using google over its competitors, and imo the only reason to use a google toolbar. it is faster than typing "site:domainname along with a searchterm. Google continues to dominate search, and 99 times out of a hundred, the google sitesearch yields far better results than the on-site search tool.
TV LCD site:bestbuy.com
So we can narrow down our results and search within results when we can't go beyond a thousand items.
The Internet Book Database
I think people are starting to get sick to goddamned death of Google search results firstly giving 10 pages of commercial sites in the first place so if this is something that's going to result in even more ads people don't want, it's going to die a quick death.
Google is in danger of alienating its users. If you want an example, searching for specs or reviews on most electrical items returns a couple of hundred online retailer sites in which will be buried maybe a handful of sites which is actually what you want - the specs or review without it being an e-tailer.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
What about the effect this will have on the search advertisers? Now ads are going to be displayed more often with less of a chance of click-thru. This will increase the amount of ads shown but decrease the amount of click-thrus - therefore taking optimized campaigns and making them less optimized.
I would say this is an overall benefit to users searching for information, given the awful state of many sites' internal search functionality (including Slashdot).
e.g. Search for the story a few days ago about India voting against OOXML. After a while, Slashdot gives you this. Note the lack of the article in question
Compare this with Google's site: results. Indeed Google seem to index more frequently and deeper than most sites' own search systems do.
Using Google's search-within-a-search (or site: for those who know about it) is many times faster than searching for a site, going to it, locating where their search box (or page) is, using it and waiting for the results. Another benefit of Google at this point being that the results are already sorted into a decent order and use a familiar layout.
This isn't really new... We've been able to search individual sites (with "site:foo.com" in the search box) for as long as I can remember, and those results pages show ads possibly from competitors. Google has just added a user interface component to make this easier.
The problem with the fuss and complaints about this is that those who loose visitors due to this just doesn't bother to offer a splendid service.
This goes to help the user, and potentially directing users to BETTER services, and those who loose visitors due to this doesn't want to spend money to actually make a better service, ie. their sole intention is to only get money through the portion of their service on which they might loose visitors due to this.
However, likely the visitors they loose are already those who might not be their potential customers, by the example used on the summary, if they goto monster.com rather, they don't see as Washington Post's job listings as the #1 spot to begin with.
Furthermore, if google would be a smaller company, no one would care, but because Google is dominant in their field, this cause some loud noices. Being the dominant means that your ability to compete is crippled by media, regulators and the mainstream, for example the Microsoft antitrust case for delivering IE with Windows -> No one complained that Linux distros ship with a browser, but everyone complained that MS ships their browser with Linux. Why not complain that you cannot IE "easily" into any given linux distro? We would have in that regard 'worse' antitrust case if Linux was by one major company, for making it hard to use IE (Ie. not shipping with Wine preinstalled and configured for easy installation of IE, or pre-installed).
Big companies are NOT inherently evil, and just because they do things better than anyone else in their field, they should not be crippled, or when they roll out something beneficial people shouldn't complain, but embrace the new service (however with grain of salt like any product & service offering by any company, like usual).
I don't however mean that all anti-trust cases are bullshit, but most of them. For example, telling Microsoft to let people choose their email client, browser etc. was correct move, however, forcing them to let users use Firefox for some portion of one of their products is not right. A product vendor should be free to choose how their software works, for example say that a help system is done in HTML/XML optimized for IE, and Goverment tells that users must be able to use others than IE will raise development costs significantly, and that cost is directly away from something else.
That being said, some companies truly are evil, but Google nor Microsoft aren't.
Bottomline is, the loud noise caused by this new feature from Google has all to do with greed, nothing with user & customer satisfactory (like it should be).
Disclaimer: I'm not PRO Google nor Microsoft. Google also does somethings they should not be doing, maybe just because fighting against the goverments forcing them to do those things would be way too costly. I use Windows on desktop, Linux on servers, and i do use google's mail service and search daily. To me they are tools, and has nothing to do with philosophical nor ethical decisions, and use the best tool for any given task. Linux rawks as server, Windows rawks as productive environment, and Google's search is simply put the best search there is, and i do occasionally boot up Linux as desktop and fiddle around with it. I believe Linux is way more costly as productive desktop environment than Windows, due to the interoperability software license costs and decreased productivity using sub-optimal tools for specific tasks (Gimp Photoshop, Open Office can't handle BIG tables with BIG formulas like Excel can), while Windows as server is way more costly than Linux.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
The problem with the fuss and complaints about this is that those who loose visitors due to this just doesn't bother to offer a splendid service.
The word is LOSE. Not LOOSE. Learn the fucking difference.
I bet if this was about Microsoft Search (or Yahoo!) doing the same thing - Slashdot would be up in arms about Microsoft's (or Yahoo!'s) horrible behavior and how web folks ought not to put up with such.
But it's Google, and as always Google gets a free pass.
Having a good search facility is not a benefit to a store provided they have a reasonable assumption that you will keep looking. I think this works well for high-street branded stores.
... and d) profit.
Just like the way the supermarkets move the stock, the on-line retailer wants you to: a) stick around and b) see more of what they have on offer in the hope something else will peak your interest so they can c)
So a search facility that doesn't show you what you need straight away is actually probably one designed that way.
[Yeah, I know I got the quote ass-about-tail.]
The word you want is "pique" not "peak." Very foolish error.
My friends, the Greasy Monkey, and a chap by the initials ABP concur with me that there are no ads on the internet.......
God forbid Google thinks of its userbase rather than its advertisers for once.
Is it searching the site in real-time? Or searching its cache of the site? How many times is the site crawled a day? How often is the site updated? I'm curious as to the freshness of the results. Anyone?
If they think "site:" is scary they should try this: http://www.google.com/search?q=used%20saturn
You can put in a Zipcode and get an auto generated list across sites. Note too how the filter lists change based on summary results; for example, the Amenities group is dynamically generated and changes based on the sub-group of cars you're looking at.
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
If you want to remain competitive, offer something better than the competition. You can't compete by blocking users from seeing what else is out there.
That also was the strategy of most search engines: keep users on your site as long as possible and throw as many features onto your site as possible. I leave it to you to figure out what happened to them.
There are a bunch of sites that I habitually search by googling "site:company.example.com rest of search".
And others where I use the site's search, because it works better than google.
All this is doing is shortcutting that step, and when I just tried it for Best Buy and did a secondary search for "linksys router", I didn't get any links outside Best Buy and I didn't get any ads.
Mr. Rimm-Kaufman said the new Google service also diminishes a Web publisher's role in helping users find potentially useful content. "You may want to editorialize differently when someone searches, and maybe put a premium on certain reporters or content," he said. "This moves you further out of the loop."
/.*google.*site:$mysite/ parse the search they used out of it.
So when you see a "Referrer" that matches
...why is it that people are concerned with this sort of thing? Doesn't anyone see a problem that a lot of what we do as a society appears to be driven by sales? Especially when there's no real money to back up the sales? I would think that if we were a healthy society, we would encourage technologies that empower the citizens to make the best choices for themselves. Technology should be here to make the world better for everyone, not to make money for a select few.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
"provided they have a reasonable assumption that you will keep looking"
With Google offering alternatives to a shopper's first whim? I think that companies that protest this see it as a force for erosion of mindless brand loyalty. These are the customers that you just don't have to work to keep. This will only give them ideas, which is obviously what they need. What? You mean I don't have to buy my next gadget at Best Buy after all? I have other alternatives?