Don't Blame Google for Search-within-Search

David Schatsky | March 24, 2008, 10:19 AM

The New York Times reports today on Google’s addition of a search-within-search feature, to allow users to search specific sites without leaving Google's own site.

Some brands will be upset by this, because it creates a situation in which other marketers can advertise to customers via AdWords even as they are searching the brand’s site.

The article quoted an Internet consultant and former Crutchfield exec as saying, “Some of our retail clients have pretty horrible site search… So for them, this will be a benefit. For our larger clients, we’ll probably ask Google to turn this off.” I don't know whether Google will heed such requests.

The problem here is not Google’s unnecessary “aggressiveness,” as the Internet consultant put it. Rather, the problem is that site search is still poor on so many Web sites.

We’ve tracked this phenomenon for years. It’s still the case that for many sites, Google can find things on a site that the site’s own search function cannot. That’s one reason why most consumers say they don’t lean heavily on site search. Fewer than a third of online consumers say search is the primary way they find information or products they are looking for on a particular Web site. (JupiterResearch Quantify users can see the consumer survey question and detailed response data here.)

In the case of BestBuy, the example cited in the New York Times article, my search this morning 40” lcd on the site listed just three 40” LCD TVs on the results page (and a link to “all 24 items”), along with camcorders and TV monitors (all smaller than 40”). The same search of bestbuy.com on Google returned a whole page of 40” LCD models (and the promise of 8,100 more results, along with ads from Dell, NexTag, Newegg, Shopping.com and PriceGrabber, among others.)

The solution is for marketers to make site search better, so that consumers researching products will favor site search to Google. Helpful tactics include offering, along with the most relevant results possible, other helpful and related information such as customer ratings, pricing, faceted search to narrow results, links to buying guides and the like.

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