Our friends at Insiders View have an interesting post about Google's 'previous query technique'.
This has been in varying degrees of beta testing for at least six months, but now seems to be happening a lot - particularly around high cost financial services terms.
What happens is that Google will take a user's previous query into account when serving results for a search.
So here's an example. My first search was for 'car insurance' and brought up the usual suspects. I then followed up with a search on 'Paris'.
Here's the resulting page:
To be honest, I think that this is a bit of a mess from a user's point of view. The top three sponsored links relate to car insurance, but everything else on the page relates to Paris.
Are all these links relevant to the search query? Not really.
Of course, Google would argue that the links are relevant to the searcher, who has indicated an interest in car insurance and in Paris.
But what's really going on here is that there is a limited amount of good financial services inventory, so Google is 'spreading' the search results into other pages. It's exactly like the way that retargeting on some portals and networks operates, where someone who has checked on loans offers can be shown a loans ad whilst they check their horoscope.
And as a comment on the Insiders View blog points out, this is yet another attempt by Google to grub in a little more cash. So if you reverse the searches, and look at 'Paris' and then 'Car Insurance', there are no listings at all relating to Paris, France or anything other than car insurance. Google's results are not following relevance, they are following the money!
This has been in varying degrees of beta testing for at least six months, but now seems to be happening a lot - particularly around high cost financial services terms.
What happens is that Google will take a user's previous query into account when serving results for a search.
So here's an example. My first search was for 'car insurance' and brought up the usual suspects. I then followed up with a search on 'Paris'.
Here's the resulting page:
To be honest, I think that this is a bit of a mess from a user's point of view. The top three sponsored links relate to car insurance, but everything else on the page relates to Paris.
Are all these links relevant to the search query? Not really.
Of course, Google would argue that the links are relevant to the searcher, who has indicated an interest in car insurance and in Paris.
But what's really going on here is that there is a limited amount of good financial services inventory, so Google is 'spreading' the search results into other pages. It's exactly like the way that retargeting on some portals and networks operates, where someone who has checked on loans offers can be shown a loans ad whilst they check their horoscope.
And as a comment on the Insiders View blog points out, this is yet another attempt by Google to grub in a little more cash. So if you reverse the searches, and look at 'Paris' and then 'Car Insurance', there are no listings at all relating to Paris, France or anything other than car insurance. Google's results are not following relevance, they are following the money!
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