Google’s made two changes to its search results. The first is an attempt to give you more useful suggestions for your search. For example, when you search for ‘oil’, it will come back with ‘did you mean unburned Venezuelan crude oil?’ at the very bottom of the page under the heading ‘Searches related to oil’. This is practically useless to me, partly because Venezuelan crude was NOT what I wanted to mix with Balsamic Vinegar but also because I have Google set to return 100 search results per page. I usually don’t scroll all the way to the bottom. Lazy. *Thinks* Why can’t my browser make scrolling to the bottom a one click operation? We would call it ‘Page Down’.

Chris Crum from WebProNews describes this as Google trying to improve ‘intent-based’ searches and makes the point that they still haven’t solved the ‘Java dilemma’ that Bruce Cray talked about last year. Bruce said some people searching for ‘Java’ are looking for the programming language, some for Indonesia and some for coffee beans. Hint: most are looking for the programming language.

I would guess there is enough intelligence in Google’s algorithms to detect dramatically different contexts. Perhaps Google could give you a disambiguation opportunity, like Wikipedia do…

When the page loads they could give you their best guess as to what you’re searching for, but also give you a line of disambiguation options. Choosing one of those options would then re-do the query but add in whatever word is necessary to remove the ambiguity in the original search query. So that’s another issue I’ve over-simplified to my own satisfaction.

The other change is to increase the length of ‘snippets’, the (normally two) lines of description that appear in each search result. As of now, Google extracts longer descriptions if the user’s search query has lots of words. Which makes sense because people are writing longer search queries now than they used to. And two lines is often not quite enough to give you context.

There are two ways that snippets are chosen. If you write a Description tag on your web page, in most cases, Google will use what you wrote in that tag as the snippet. If you don’t write one, Google will pinch whatever phrase/sentence it thinks best matches the keywords searched for.

So if you’re trying to get people to click on your web page, it’s a good thing to get a four line description rather than a two line one, right? Question is, does this mean you should re-write your Description tags as four lines instead of two?

My guess is that it will not be necessary. Mostly what’s happening under the new system is that if Google finds lots of matching keywords it is ignoring your Description tag and pulling out the phrases surrounding the keyword. Indirectly, Google are increasing their control of the way search results are displayed and lessening the influence of the webmaster.

Book in for Web Promotion SHOCK – it’s aimed at businesses who want to increase their web traffic. The cost is $75; designed to give usable knowledge that people can implement themselves or pass on to their webmaster.

Most Australian businesses, including some very large ones, have no idea about the basic principles of search engine optimisation. (I recently wrote about advertising agencies as an example). So part of my agenda is to share that knowledge. Here is the SHOCK: it ain’t that tricky.

There are still businesses that view their web site as one of those things you have to have. Like a Business Card. But the Internet has become fundamental to how people collect information. Much more powerful than just another advertising medium. Some of the companies I work with are generating ALL their new business off the Internet because they have web stategies that deliver relevant information to people who are looking.

You don’t need a web site. You need a web strategy. Part of that is usually keywords-based SEO that puts you at the top of the Google results for certain terms. Like I am for marketing consultant Perth and like my clients are for most of their target keyword phrases.

I will probably pick up some work optimising people’s web pages, but for me, it’s not so much about editing the Title tags, it involves working out the best use of the web to deliver a business result.

If you know someone who’s not making the most of the web, I’d appreciate your mentioning the seminar to them. Here is the Web Promotion SHOCK flyer if you’d like to print it out. Register here.