Internet Marketing
Marketing With Out The Fluff

Yesterday Google held its Searchology event and announced a number of new things. The big announcements, which were widely covered included: – Search Options – Google Squared – Richer Snippets – Android Sky Map Application Google’s Matt Cutts pulled some other interesting things from the event that some may have overlooked amidst the whirlwind of Google news. "I noticed several tidbits that I don’t think we’ve ever said in public before," says Cutts. First he mentions Google’s internal code names for spell-check features. These include the normal "Did you mean:" spell check link at the top of the results, but also the mid-page suggestions (codename: Chameleon): And the more aggressive Spellmeleon, which includes a couple results for the corrected query. Cutts says this is for when Google really thinks the user messed up. He also notes that this feature is a tremendous help for is webspam team because it pretty much eliminates the chances of users going on to results that spammers have targeted for typos. Other things Cutts pulled out of Searchology include: – mobile search results are blended between results from the mobile web and results from the regular web. – 1 in 4 searches triggers a universal/blended search result – 40% of searches on any given day are repeat searches for that user (a reason that SearchWiki can be useful) – Links to Jayant Madhavan’s paper on what Google is doing to crawl the deep web – Also links to each slide from the event The event was a big one for Google and Google enthusiasts in terms of items of interest. Google rolls out some new product or feature to a product nearly every day, but at Searchology we got a bunch of stuff to think about.  

This week, it was announced that Google was making changes to search referral URLs . Basically, where URLs looked like this before: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search They will start looking more like this: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw You can read a bit more about that here . Web technologist Niall Kennedy suggested that this was probably a change being made to better track search actions and shield URL parameters from sites downstream. Alex Chitu at the blog Google Operating System had a different and frankly, more interesting theory , which is that it is a solution for the lack of referral information in a future Ajax interface. Matt Cutts recently explained in the following clip that Google was testing AJAX results on a small number of users to open up potentially faster searching capabilities. Listening to him discuss how this would affect analytics puts the URL changes a little bit more into perspective. Chitu’s theory was confirmed when a Google spokesperson told CNET that this was the reasoning for the referral URL change. "These guys are working hard to make things milliseconds faster. They’re always experimenting," the spokesperson said. In the above video, Cutts says the experiment is only available to less than 1% of Google users. Basically what it does is loads search results without loading the entire page each time a new search is performed. Milliseconds indeed.