This article is part two of a two part article; the first part can be found here.
Shopping or Price Comparison Results
As price comparison engines like DealTime (now Shopping.com), Kelkoo, and Price Runner grew in popularity, so the search engines began to see them as a potential threat; somewhere else consumers could search for products and online stores other than the search engines themselves. Over time they have integrated shopping results into their search results, either by buying a shopping search site (Yahoo! bought Kelkoo in Europe) or by building their own (Google built Froogle to provide shopping search and price comparisons).
How businesses list their products on price comparison engines varies by the type of product or service they offer and by engine – a topic we’ll be covering in a future article. Figure 2 below shows a link to shopping results on Yahoo! and Figure 3 shopping results from Froogle, shown in the main results of Google. The search engines do not show a shopping result for every product search, but aim to target searchers when they are at the point when they wish to compare features and prices.
Figure 2: Link to Nokia 6230 shopping results on Yahoo! UK
Figure 3: Froogle results for an Acer 4200 laptop on Google.
News Results
One of the most common uses of the web is of course reading the latest news – and searching for articles from the past. The search engines show news results for searches they believe they will be the most useful for. Google have built their own news search engine (Google News) which allows searchers to search multiple news stories around the world, including national and regional news sites and specialist publications. MSN use the news syndication technology of Moreover with their own technology on top; Yahoo also have a news search engine.
Websites that are listed in these results contain regularly updated news sections or may be pres release websites; the later are sometimes criticised for adding biased results to the news search results.
Figure 4: News results for Virgin Galactic on MSN UK News
Shortcuts in Search Results
For some searches it’s not possible for the search engines to show a result straight away; they may need more information from the searches (such as their location) or there may not be enough space in screen to show all the information available. Increasingly the search engines are tempting the searcher to view this additional content or supply more information with what are loosely described as shortcuts – links or search boxes that when used lead to pages with more information.
For example, a search for a movie currently showing at the cinema might produce an additional search box at Google into which a zip code or postcode can be entered to show cinemas near by showing the film, as well as links to reviews. Other example are links to price comparison results at Yahoo (as described above) and Local and Map results at Google.
These are sometimes referred to as “invisible tabs” – the searcher does not have to specify a type of search by clicking a particular tab; the search engine analyses the words hey used to search and adjusts the shortcuts shown accordingly. This is an area the engines constantly seek to improve and therefore provide a better experience to their users.
Figure 5: A cinema search box at Google, triggered by a search for the film “Cars”
Local Results and Maps
The offline Yellow Pages industry is worth billions of dollars and the public are increasingly searching online for local business and information. This has led to the development of local search websites including Yellow pages websites (known as Internet Yellow Pages, IYPs) and in the last couple of years, local search services from the search engines, merging easy to using maps, satellite photos, driving directions and local business listings. Google, Yahoo and MSN all have local search services.
Figure 6: Local Search Results on MSN UK
These two articles have provided an overview of the most commonly used types of search results; however there are others, including:
• Image search
• Newsgroup search
• Book search
• Academic search
• Video and audio search
• Topical search
• RSS / Feed search
• Answers and help
• Local computer (desktop) search
These can be read about and used from the advanced search options pages of the different engines.
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Duncan Parry helps UK companies meet their objectives for their websites using pay per click advertising and search engine optimization to increase visitor numbers and sales levels. He has previously worked for the search engines Espotting (now Miva) and Lycos in the UK.
Duncan Parry began working in search at the end of 1999 when he joined Lycos UK to work on the Link project, a new directory of UK websites. As a directory editor he researched, categorized and wrote short descriptions of hundreds of UK-specific websites in categories including genealogy, finance and business before taking responsibility for three of the fastest growing categories - computing, telecommunications and the Internet. Results from the directory feed into Lycos search results.
In November 2001 he left Lycos to join pay per click search engine Espotting at the beginning of a time of remarkable growth for the company and the search industry as a whole. Espotting won deals to power the advertising on the search results in Europe of Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, Lycos and many ISPs and destination sites.
Whilst at Espotting Duncan rose to Agency Editorial Manager, responsible for an Editorial team that managed the UK search advertising across Espotting’s network of the clients of major advertising agencies. He also personally managed the UK campaigns of famous-name ecommerce websites and consistently improved advertiser spend and performance. He also worked with management to develop internal systems and business processes as the company rapidly expanded across Europe from 50 employees to over 180 and then merged with US-based FindWhat.com.
Duncan left Espotting in February 2004 to act as a search marketing consultant for companies including VNU Business Publications, a network of IT, business and finance titles in the UK.
In February 2005 he setup Steak Media , one of the UK’s fastest growing search marketing firms.
All of Duncan's articles represent his own opinion and not those of his employers, present or past.
