Inline search in Google results
Cory Bergman March 13th, 2008
Has anyone seen this before?
Search within search. Pretty cool feature. Anyone know how to add this?
Update: The feature is about a week old, according to this Google post, which explains it’s fully automated: “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.” Thanks Amanda for solving the mystery!
14 Comments Add your own
1. Aaron | March 13th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
Interesting. Looks like it’s on a handful of newspapers. NY Times has it, but not Boston Globe. Portland, LA, and Seattle have it. Miami doesn’t, Chicago does.
I can see this being useful on all sorts of other sites, too — lifehacker, eHow, etc.
Oh — the inline search shows up for eHow! Now it’s a game to find the magic terms.
2. discreet_chaos | March 13th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
Cory - Prompted by this post, I punched KING5 into a regular Google Search and it produced the same search-within-search for your station. Therefore, I’m going to guess that the option is determined by Google News for some or possibly all of the sites that they index.
3. discreet_chaos | March 13th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
Okay, further testing shows that it’s probably not all, but if it’s available for your station and you didn’t know it, then I’m going to stick with my Google theory until someone says otherwise.
4. Amanda E. | March 14th, 2008 at 12:18 am
Only media outlet here in Spokane that has that nifty feature is the Spokesman-Review.
Than again it appears that they also created a custom Google search for their site. Possibly related maybe?
5. Amanda E. | March 14th, 2008 at 1:16 am
Click my name, google has more information on this new feature
6. discreet_chaos | March 14th, 2008 at 7:51 am
So, Google determines who gets it and because it’s assigned when they’ve detected “a high probability that a user wants more refined search results”, then it’ll only go to those who partner with Google for their in-house search?
7. Bob | March 14th, 2008 at 10:58 am
This has been there for years. Deep linking is cool.
8. oakling | March 14th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
I suspect that it’s not just sites that partner with Google for their search. Google already has the ability to put in a domain name and search just through pages on that domain; using that (through a nicer-looking, more easily accessible little secondary search box like this) would let them present this to the user more often than if they only did it for sites that had Google search boxes set up. Plus, it’s not really their style to give an unfair edge to people who use their products.
9. Amanda E. | March 14th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Doing some thinking, I suspect its just sites that people have a tendency to do “site name and topic” style searches on. The older relatives in my family tend use the google toolbar for those kind of searches if they want to find something on a certain domain.
10. Rob | March 14th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
This function is AWESOME!
Except for the fact that Google has a three-month-old index for my site and all of the search within the site links are dead and give users 404 errors since we switched to a new platform (WorldNow) in December.
But other than that tiny little three-month-old oversight … neat feature.
11. Amanda E. | March 14th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Rob, its your robots.txt file that is keeping Google away. I see the same issue on a few other WorldNow sites I looked at.
I’ll send you an email in a bit explaining it further.
12. Anonymous | March 15th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
It still takes 1/2 a page to find the link to the actual website in the first place. Is this helpful or diverting us from directly finding the item we want?
If we Google GOOGLE will the customer service links suddenly appear?
13. discreet_chaos | March 15th, 2008 at 8:08 pm
It also means that the target doesn’t get a page impression for the search form, nor do they get one for the results and there are Adsense ads on some of the result pages that I’ve generated. So, Google is “costing” the targeted website two impressions, plus they could theoretically divert the searcher to one of their adclients, all based on an index of somebody else’s product.
14. discreet_chaos | March 16th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Oh, and if it they were offering regular links, there’d also be a impression on the homepage. So, Google’s offering may be “cool” from the surfer side, but this new feature is costing KING5, eHow, the Seattle Times or whomever else is getting the treatment, three advertising opportunities (homepage, searchpage, results). And, Google’s naturally including Adsense ads on their pages, so they could divert the searcher to another site; your competitor could buy keywords based on your name and if your page has Adsense for Content, then the searchers may have already seen (and dismissed) duplicate ads.
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