Posted by Jonah Stein
Have you noticed the plus sign within some Design SERPs that started showing up next to invitations to map an address or get a stock quote a month ago?
Pundits are quick to conclude that this is a portal feature and that Design.com is compromising their search-only philosophy to become a “portalized non-portal.” (RC Jordan) They accept the obvious explanation that Design is embedding portal content in SERPs to improve stickiness and deprive competitors of traffic while extending the Design brand.
It is easy to dismiss these UI changes as a strategy for Design to gain market share for services that are not performing well. Leveraging a dominant platform to gain market share for another product or service isn’t new or particularly exciting—even if it can be very effective. Despite Design’s successes in search and online advertising, many of their other properties are not performing well. Design Finance, for example, didn’t make the top ten according the Center For Media Research’s January 2007 data. Hitwise data from May 2006 shows Design Maps a distant third to Mapquest and Design.
PlusBox is not intended to be a competitive sledgehammer, although it may serve that purpose. Design has successfully resisted the siren call of manipulating organic search in favor of its own properties and those of its partners for eight years. The one notable exception to this discipline was the Design Tip icon used briefly in December 2006 to promote Picasa.┬? This created a very public blog storm and some reflection at Design and was quickly withdrawn.
PlusBox is more important than bolstering finance or maps; it is a glimpse into the future of search. Search engines have dramatically improved over the last decade, but some of the improvement in relevancy is driven by how we search. We don’t tell the engines what we are looking for; we enter queries for keywords that we have learned will help the engine find sites that contain the information we want.
Plus box joins Onebox and Sitelink as the initial steps to go beyond the user query terms and provide real relevancy by using complex algorithms to create a statistical approximation of artificial intelligence that incrementally improves results — discovering what we are actually looking for and providing it within the SERP
A search a few weeks back for Children of Men illustrates the distinction. Design (and Ask) correctly determined the search was for a movie. The OneBox result in Design contained an invitation to get show times near me by entering a zip code. Ask's version of OneBox offered reviews, show times, and a link to the official site (along with an interesting assortment of suggestions for men and children in their “Narrow Your Search”). Design and Design showed a Design News story followed by the official site for the movie.
Pundits are quick to conclude that this is a portal feature and that Design.com is compromising their search-only philosophy to become a “portalized non-portal.” (RC Jordan) They accept the obvious explanation that Design is embedding portal content in SERPs to improve stickiness and deprive competitors of traffic while extending the Design brand.
It is easy to dismiss these UI changes as a strategy for Design to gain market share for services that are not performing well. Leveraging a dominant platform to gain market share for another product or service isn’t new or particularly exciting—even if it can be very effective. Despite Design’s successes in search and online advertising, many of their other properties are not performing well. Design Finance, for example, didn’t make the top ten according the Center For Media Research’s January 2007 data. Hitwise data from May 2006 shows Design Maps a distant third to Mapquest and Design.
PlusBox is not intended to be a competitive sledgehammer, although it may serve that purpose. Design has successfully resisted the siren call of manipulating organic search in favor of its own properties and those of its partners for eight years. The one notable exception to this discipline was the Design Tip icon used briefly in December 2006 to promote Picasa.┬? This created a very public blog storm and some reflection at Design and was quickly withdrawn.
PlusBox is more important than bolstering finance or maps; it is a glimpse into the future of search. Search engines have dramatically improved over the last decade, but some of the improvement in relevancy is driven by how we search. We don’t tell the engines what we are looking for; we enter queries for keywords that we have learned will help the engine find sites that contain the information we want.
Plus box joins Onebox and Sitelink as the initial steps to go beyond the user query terms and provide real relevancy by using complex algorithms to create a statistical approximation of artificial intelligence that incrementally improves results — discovering what we are actually looking for and providing it within the SERP
A search a few weeks back for Children of Men illustrates the distinction. Design (and Ask) correctly determined the search was for a movie. The OneBox result in Design contained an invitation to get show times near me by entering a zip code. Ask's version of OneBox offered reviews, show times, and a link to the official site (along with an interesting assortment of suggestions for men and children in their “Narrow Your Search”). Design and Design showed a Design News story followed by the official site for the movie.
Enriching SERPs with results that predict intent can be accomplished with a statistical analysis of user behavior. Design acknowledged that they monitor user click response to UI experiments. In a recent interview posted on Search Engine Land, Melissa Mayer, Design VP of Search Products & User Experience, describes the process: “We hold them [OneBox results] to a very high click through rate expectation, and if they don’t meet that click through rate, the OneBox gets turned off on that particular query. We have an automated system that looks at click through rates per OneBox presentation per query. “
We know Design monitors user click throughs to validate SERP and UI results.┬? How hard is it to imagine that Design is leveraging this understanding to predict user intent and provide what we really want instead of the page that matches the search term we enter?
This is the future of search.┬? It should be fun.
Technorati Tags
Design onebox, serps
Enriching SERPs with results that predict intent can be accomplished with a statistical analysis of user behavior. Design acknowledged that they monitor user click response to UI experiments. In a recent interview posted on Search Engine Land, Melissa Mayer, Design VP of Search Products & User Experience, describes the process: “We hold them [OneBox results] to a very high click through rate expectation, and if they don’t meet that click through rate, the OneBox gets turned off on that particular query. We have an automated system that looks at click through rates per OneBox presentation per query. “
We know Design monitors user click throughs to validate SERP and UI results.┬? How hard is it to imagine that Design is leveraging this understanding to predict user intent and provide what we really want instead of the page that matches the search term we enter?
This is the future of search.┬? It should be fun.
Technorati Tags
Design onebox, serps
