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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."
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
Would a search of 'google' result in infinite recursion?
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.
Search engines were around before there were many (any?) ad-supported web sites.
Google has taken steps to build content libraries, like book search, news, e-mail, earth/maps, YouTube, etc. Caching everything ensures they'll be useful even if there's nothing else but google.
Shopping sites are more than happy to stay online without ads. Maybe instead of a lot of content (already designed to drive ads views) with a few ads on the page, we'll just have lots of product info on a site, with a few pages of a little content. No doubt if you want to make a "Coca Cola is the greatest drink ever" site, Coke would be happy to host it, even in a post-ad-apocalyptic internet.
With sites like Wikipedia, citeseer, Archive.org, government sites, universities, etc., the internet will continue to be quite useful to a great many people, even if all profit on the internet dies a horrible death (which is ludicrous).
Frankly, I think this is all bullshit. If you can't turn a profit if you're forced to fairly compete with competitors and their advertising, you're doing something wrong. Luckily, it'll only take a quick web search on Google (and a peek at the ads) to find another company that will be HAPPY to fill-in when you go away.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
these company's are just cry babies that fell over each other trying to get top placed google ratings, and now they don't like the tiny bit of competition.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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.
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.
>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.
Many businesses are depending entirely on ads and search results
That's THEIR problem, isn't it? I'm really getting sick of these corporations getting bent out of shape because I don't use the internet like they want me to. "Oh noes they is using Google instead of my own shitty internal search!" "Oh noes they be using google instead of clicking on my blinkey shiney ads!" "Ohe noes they uses adblock to avoid my annoying blinkey shiney ads!"
I've gotten to the point that if I see any advertising for a particular company I avoid its wares entirely if possible, and the more annoying and full of lies it is the more I avoid it.
Every day I think I couln't possible be more disgusted with the corporations, and every day they still manage to top the previous day. Their contempt for their customers seems to have no bounds.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
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.]