Google’s SiS adds Zen-like feature. Good for them? Yes. Good for you? Read on…

Retailers and publishers are perturbed at Google over a new feature “Search within Site” (SiS). Why have so many web feathers been ruffled? Google has offered this functionality for at least 7 years, but a larger audience is only just now becoming aware and in some cases upset by it. Why’s that?

Ever wanted a great example of the impact that Zen-like, intuitive, experiential user interaction design can make? Here it is.

Google has offered search within a specific site for a long time. For example to search within washingtonpost.com for george bush you can use this operation:

site:washingtonpost.com george bush

Until now, this technique, buried in Google’s advanced search options was known and used almost exclusively by SEO types, not by typical users.

But BAM! An inviting, intuitive, experiential search box is now appearing in the search results beneath the main link when you search for the name of a site. Enter a search term like washingtonpost in it, and the same “site:” functionality gets triggered, allowing you to search only the given site.

“Search within Site” hits the user interface flow and now it is getting a lot of attention. This is entirely an interaction design change. It is proof that interaction design matters a great deal—sometimes more than functionality.

What does it mean for you?

For most, it is a positive change, but it really depends on who you are.

Good for Google?

Certainly, it gives them more impressions to display ads.

Good for the retailers or content distributors?

Definitely not. Now they have less ownership of the user. That’s where the rub is.

Good for users?

Yes—usually. “Search within Site” offers a user good search functionality at their fingertips. Many sites have abysmal search functionality so this is a big improvement.

BUT…

But a lot of the large websites already use Google for their site search. In many cases they are using a highly customized version of Google that is better than the generic Google.

Currently here’s where Google fails from the user perspective:

A Case Study of 3 Google Searches

Right now, “Search within Site” does not work very well for searches of news sites. Google’s algorithm fails to capture some aspects such as recency very well.

Let’s look at 3 different Google searches:

1)Washington Post’s own search results for “george bush”
NOTE: This is a search powered by Google, using a customized version of Google’s algorithm.

2)Google News “Search within Site” washingtonpost.com results for “george bush”

NOTE: This type of search is not currently available through the SiS one-box search

3)Google’s “Search within Site” washingtonpost.com results for “george bush”

NOTE: This is what SiS currently offers.

ANALYSIS:

Washington Post’s own results (1) are the best quality because they are customized based on actual recency—i.e. top articles are from today, March 26. Google news results (2) come in second with older articles from March 19 and 24 at the top. Finally “Search within Site” (3) comes in last with the top result showing a story reaching as far back as 2005.

CONCLUSIONS?

The 3 searches above are ranked from highest to lowest quality. However if we were to rank them in terms of exposure to Google searchers, the order would be:

1) Google regular SiS web search

2) Washington Post search

3) Google news SiS search

In other words, all three searches are powered by Google. However, the search with the greatest exposure is not currently the highest quality. For this particular type of site search, Google’s SiS change does not promote the best user experience.

Future: Zen Refinements

In the future, it would create a better user experience if Google would at least use its own news search instead of the regular SiS search for news sites.

Bill Fenwick
Drue Kataoka
Svetlozar Kazanjiev