March 4th, 2008
Google Experiments with Search Within Search
By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews
Google has begun offering secondary search boxes within their search results (above). Typical of Google offerings, not everyone is seeing the “feature” yet, as it rolls out to different data centers.
The secondary box restricts the search to the site in question. It seems like the searches that are most likely to bring up the secondary box involves retailers (as above), although The New York Times brings up a secondary box and some say YouTube and Wikipedia do also (though I did not see that result).
How are these sites are chosen? Do they have to pay for this extra search box, or is some algorithm at work?
Since it’s not available in all data centers yet, if you really want to see it now, you can try this data center where the new feature is working.
What do you readers think of this new feature? Try it out and let me know.
Keith says:
I like the feature and see myself using it. A couple things that would have been nice:
1. Use AJAX wizardry to have the box hidden until requested. It takes up considerable room for a Google feature.
2. While a bit more difficult to implement, and only practical for well known, high traffic sites, allow an option to have the search be passed to the web site’s own search engine and displayed thusly. Google doesn’t list products I might want to search for in quite the same way as a well constructed retail site.
March 4th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
Twig says:
Used it to search some info on snopes.com. Got what I wanted. Fast. Nice performance.
March 5th, 2008 at 7:36 pm