Search within a site: A tale of teleportation
Posted by Ben Lee, Software Engineer,
and Jack Menzel, Product Manager
Have you ever forgotten the exact address of a site that you wanted
to visit? Not a problem - just type the name of the site into the
Google search box and hopefully it appears at the top of the search
results page.
We call this "teleporting", and we're pleased that we
have been able to minimize the need to remember an alphabet soup of
.coms, .nets, and .orgs out of everyone's lives. However, one
of the trends we noticed while studying teleporting was that there
were lots of searchers who would type the name of a specific
website as if they wanted to teleport, but would then immediately
issue another more a refined search within this site.
For example, if someone is looking for official information about
the
id="ftnz" >Hubble Space Telescope on the NASA website, one might
first search for [NASA] and then [NASA Hubble Telescope], like
this:
href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_Ap14FtNN91w/R883J65W4II/AAAAAAAAA20/CxvglcYMwDQ/s1600-h/search_subset.gif" >
alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5174415140440170626"
border="0" />
Through
id="g-73" >experimentation, we found that presenting users with
a search box as part of the result increases their likelihood of
finding the exact page they are looking for. So over the past few
days we have been testing, and today we have fully rolled out, a
search box that appears within some of the search results
themselves. This feature will now occur when we detect a high
probability that a user wants more refined search results within a
specific site. Like the rest of our snippets, the sites that
display the site search box are chosen algorithmically based on
metrics that measure how useful the search box is to users.
We hope that you will make use of the site search box in order to
get the information you're looking for as quickly and easily as
possible.
No comments yet. Be the first to comment this post.