October 23, 2009

Even More Results from a Site

Like most search engines, Google doesn't show too many results from a domain on a single search results pages. Until recently, Google displayed at most 2 consecutive results from a site, followed by a link that restricted the results to that site.

Some recent results show that Google adjusted this policy and it now allows 3 or even 4 consecutive results from the same site.



Google also displays 4 additional results bellow some forum threads and it makes it easier to find more results from a site without opening a new page.

5 comments:

  1. Good its more structured ,otherwise it may appear as redundant information.

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  2. Why do they think this is a good idea? Isn't the idea to give the user a selection of results to choose from?

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  3. I have two feelings here:

    1) Someone at Google looked at the "preview" pane offered by Bing and thought that there was UX value within. My mother, an over-educated woman with discretionary income (read: potential ad clicker) who serves as my litmus test for all thing UX (I'm in that small User Experience "focus group" as well), found the Bing additional offering redundant -- and I find the Google offering both redundant but also confusing.

    2) Why hasn't Google been able to drill-down further into domains to deliver the one result within a domain that most closely matches my query? So often I've gotta' do the drilling myself.

    Tnx

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  4. so basically top ranking sites now get more slots?

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  5. Actually, this is fairly logical. If you look at their example results, the first one is a very specific query. They will probably use this only when the relevance of sites beyond the first is dubious. If the first result has very strong relevance they offer a few extra options.

    The second result is qualified by a query term that matches a high-profile domain name. The user is pretty clearly interested in Orkut articles on Techcrunch.

    This does not look like something that will be ham-fistedly applied across the board. Instead, it looks like if there are strong-probability matches from a specific site, Google will attempt to offer more options within that site.

    It's not a good UX to wider options if the options are less relevant.

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