Google’s New Move – The Search Box
Google never stops innovating. Today, working on one of the projects i typed the word “wikipedia” into Google as a spell check and was very surprised to see this:
An hour or so later, I was checking Bloglines for SEO news and sure enough Search Engine Land picked it up. Google is testing a new, very innovative way of featuring search box in its search results. In order for the search box to appear, you must search for the name of the website / company. For example: “Amazon”
If you do utilize the search box, Google puts the following command(searched for ipod): ipod site:amazon.com redirecting you to another search result page.
It seems that for now this feature is only limited to the websites with internal search engines, but i feel Google will offer it on more websites, allowing to search through a domain without visiting the domain itself.
Here are some websites that currently feature this search box:
Implications?
If Google features the search box for most brand / domain / navigational queries, websites have a potential of loosing some traffic, as people who have not found a relevant result might hit that scary back button and explore other searches. On the other hand it’s quite convenient, as long as people find what they need.
SEOs for portal and ecommerce level sites will have to take into consideration this new feature.
This is also an opportunity to optimize more internal pages and find out more about user intent and their searches within the site, as internal search information will most likely be available in webmaster tools.
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