I don't know whether anyone's seen this before, but I just saw an experiment on a Google SERP with inline results for a related search. The search term was 'atom' and Google got it completely wrong (offering me 'atom cars') since I was looking for information on the XML type of Atom. I posted a screenshot on my blog at http://gizbuzz.co.uk/?p=242 .
It could potentially be a useful addition to SERPs, but it is clear they are going to have to do some algorithm tweaking to get it to work properly. |
Interesting. When did you see this? |
> I don't know whether anyone's seen this before, but I just saw
> an experiment on a Google SERP with inline results for a
> related search.
Yes, this has been around for quite some time. I'm pretty sure that it's now a permanent feature for certain ambiguous terms rather than just an experiment. |
I don't think its a permanent feature, because I checked the same search through a proxy and it had normal results. Maybe they're just scaling up the testing. The 'inline' results also link to a Google URL, with some added variables at the end – 'revisions_inline&ct=result&cd=1', meaning that they're still testing efficacy.
Interestingly, it also only seems to appear when I use the search bar in firefox, rather than the Google search box. |
> Maybe they're just scaling up the testing.
No, this is actually no interface prototype but a permanent feature, as Tony mentioned. Of course, just as with other permanent features (like instant Google Image results in web search when searching for e.g. [van gogh]), this will show for only some searches, and sometimes there are also datacenter differences. Then again, depending on how you define "testing" you might be right – I think Google's web search results are under constant scrutiny by Google engineers, and they're constantly getting back usage results to optimize the usability, and they sometimes even redesign features that have been around for years (e.g. they did that with how AdSense is layouted). |
The best one of these was posted in Google Blogoscoped a while back. Search for oohay (yahoo spelled backwards) and see what else you get...
http://www.google.com/search?q=oohay |
