Google Might Make Web Design More Important…
Google is apparently testing a feature in its search results pages that allows users to see full-page previews of sites before they click through to them.
Patrick Altoft at BlogStorm spotted the test, providing the screenshot below and saying, “One of the fascinating things about this is that they are highlighting certain sections of the page in orange and expanding the text to provide a snippet of information. This shows that they have the technology to know exactly where a piece of text is on every single web page. The snippets highlighted are not always the same as the snippet in the search results.”
That doesn’t include the ways Google is changing the way we search on mobile devices with things like Voice Search and Google Goggles (not to mention Google TV).
If the preview feature goes on to become a full-fledged feature, I’m going to have to consider that a major one. This could dramatically affect clickthroughs, for better or for worse. We’ll really get to see how big a part web design plays in conversions at that point. It’s conceivable that consumers will be drawn even more to well-known brands and familiar layouts.
Late last year, Google released a tool called Browser Size that shows you how others view your site. More specifically, it shows you the percentages of people that will see certain portions of your site without having to scroll. This shouldn’t really have much affect on the full-page previews in SERPs, but it can come in handy for when the user clicks through.
We’ve reached out to Google for more information on the preview feature. We’ll update when we get more info.
Update: Google gave us the classic response: “At any given time we are running between 50-200 search experiments.
Filed under Breaking News by on Oct 10th, 2010. 
Google’s Matt Cutts discussed two key ingredients of where Google is headed in an interview out in Vegas. The first of these ingredients is of course Google’s much discussed Algorithm update (Caffeine), which was recently found to begin rolling out soon.
Caffeine will not roll out to the rest of Google’s data centers until after the holidays. He says that while Google could have rolled the update out faster, they didn’t want to upset webmasters by releasing it before the holidays. This is something that happened in the past when Google released its infamous Florida update before the holidays, causing rankings to drastically change. Cutts says not to panic.
Filed under Breaking News by on Sep 15th, 2010.
- Image via CrunchBase
Chris Crum reports again that Google is always changing their algorithms… No surprise there.
Algorithm Changes, Experiments, and Acquisitions
There are currently some interesting happenings with Google search that webmasters may want to pay attention to. The company, which is always busy, has been making moves, which may greatly affect its flagship product – search. This is all in addition to everything the company is doing in social media, mobile, gaming, advertising and everything else (which all may have their own separate impacts on search).
Have you noticed recent changes in your ranking?
Algorithm Change
Google makes changes to its algorithm all the time, but when a change comes with an announcement, you know people are going to talk. On Friday, Google announced a tweak designed to surface multiple pages from a single site for relevant queries.
“For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site,” says Google software engineer Samarth Keshava. “Prior to today’s change, only two results from www.amnh.org would have appeared for this query. Now, we determine that the user is likely interested in the Museum of Natural History‘s website, so seven results from the amnh.org domain appear. Since the user is looking for exhibitions at the museum, it’s far more likely that they’ll find what they’re looking for, faster. The last few results for this query are from other sites, preserving some diversity in the results.”
Google is trying to think like the user more and more all the time… Maybe we should too!
Filed under Breaking News by on Aug 25th, 2010.
