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."

Get a search aggregator

[Anonymous Coward]

www.copernic.com that already has search within the results

Re:They don't complain

[HUADPE]

Those two store are in fact the same store. That might explain the similar problems. Future shop was originally independent, but is now wholly owned by Best Buy.

Re:So...

[TheThiefMaster]

If you had the google toolbar (like I do, it's the only toolbar I ever install) then you already had a nice easy way to search the current site with google. Just type some keywords in the google search box, and pick "current site" off the search dropdown. It also has a nice handy button to highlight the words you searched for in the page so you can find them if the site has a lot of text (not likely) as well as one button for each word you searched for that performs a find in the page for that word.

Re:They don't complain

[Spliffster]

"Maybe I'm naive, but I routinely choose not to search a site with google (if there is an option)."

I do it the other way 'round. whenever i want to search a site by keywords I go to google and enter:

site:. [[[keyword] keyword] ...]

As long as searching for keywords, most sites' searches suck big hairy monkeballs[TM]! why not use what works well ?

If you have privacy concerns you are free to create as many firefox profiles as you wish. I use one for gmail (better yet imaps), one for googlepages and one for my daily browsing (with all google cookies blocked). I am blocking google cookies because they started to customize my results in a way that i got different results on every computer i am using (that's annoying).

Cheers,
-S

This is ridiculous

[nevali]

1. This is just a nice UI to sticking "site:example.com"in the search terms (something many consumers don't know how to do)

2. Most sites' internal search engines suck balls, don't work at all, or even don't exist.

3. The consumer is already using Google, and these companies go out of their way to get the pages and products listed and ranked well in the SERPs; suddenly they complain when Google makes it even easier for people to find things on their sites?

I smell a red herring.

Re:They don't complain

[twistedsymphony]

How is this "new tool" any different than the "site:" command that google has always had to search within a particular domain?

I bring this up because Google lets you integrate their search engine int your site for free and all it does is add "site:yourdomain.com" to the end of the query. I've replaced the normal search on one of my sites [thoughthead.com] with google's search because it works much much better, there's no reason other sites couldn't do the same.

Re:They don't complain

[The Redster!]

Far as I can tell, there's no difference. In fact, when you use this thing, that's exactly what you get -- the search results page even shows that it's the result of a site: search in the text box.

All they've done is put a little GUI front on it. You're still clearly within the realm of google search results. Really, I don't think I'd ever use this feature much. If I'm searching a particular domain it's still easier (to me) to just type site:url and do one query.