Google Search Box on the Search Results Page Sucks – Site Search

I noticed this search box on the Google search results page beneath the Amazon.com listing a few weeks ago and thought, cool. Lets see if it gets me past the home page amazon and to the search results page on Amazon.com. It would take me one step closer to what I am looking for on this site if it worked.

But instead it just brought me a list of pages on Amazon while still being in Google’s search results. YUCK! That sucks. I don’t want to stay on Google longer, I want to get to the book/dvd/whatever I am looking for and it’s on Amazon. This added another step in my process and I hate when sites do that for profit. It’s like a big interstitial ad that interrupts your log-in process on Monster or those stupid interstitial on Forbes articles. It is bad usability and bad user experience and people should complain about it so they remove this feature. (and of course don’t use the feature because if they see usage numbers in their stats they will think people like it and keep it)

It doesn’t surprise me that Google would want to keep you on their site longer so they can serve adwords against the results and possibly distract you away from what you originally intended to do or find but what I was surprised about  was that they thought they were better about finding products/pages on amazon than amazon itself. And that is a self centered conceited view to think you know Amazon’s business better than they do and to use that as justification to poach their traffic and users. Ouch.

I think Google also may be looking at this new search box in the search results as a way to get more into vertical search using their main search box as a starting point for picking your vertical and then the second search box to search within the site or specific vertical you choose. Google probably thinks they are prime for this kind of use because they already index everything and just need to figure out a hierarchical interface to display it all and make the difference in level of detail in the results visual. Then they can conquer the world…muhahaha…The only problem with that idea is that I don’t know an real live humans that like or look for vertical search. The sites that create content around a vertical are brands and have a real product that cost money to produce so they aren’t just web companies that crawl, slurp, scrape and steal other people’s original content and display it with advertising along site like Google.

So, overall I give this search box in the search results change a thumbs down, grade F for bad user experience keeping people away from what they want longer while displaying more ads and bad traffic poaching from genuine product sites. Google should remove this feature as it does no one any good and will deteriorate their relationship with real publishing and product sites over time. And if Google thinks they can play hardball and corner companies into accepting this, think again. I am sure there are some legal eagles out there that will be happy to bring this to court.

Google offers new exclude features in adwords

Google has been innovating how yor ads get displayed and un in adwords for about 4 years now. They have given you control over the matching, the timing, the budgeting, the creative serving, the site targeting, excluding sites and now apparently excluding certain pages on sites.

What I want to know is how detailed are these adwords campaigns? How detailed of knowedge do you have to have about every media property these ads run on in the content network? Seriously, if you have a company or client that runs over 500K worth of these ads, there isn’t enough time in the day to spend targeting each keyword. It would take months to build.

I fret about the lackluster results of the campaigns I see here and worry that our lack of detail and optimization will come back to bite us at some point, (even though I don’t work on them myself) but I also know with this many clients and that many words to manage, we can’t possibly spend the detailed time that someone could if that were their job in house.

So, I guess the lesson here is that you keep the ad campaigns small and mainstream termed if you use and agency and if you want to chase the long tail and control your ad serving like a hawk, hire someone internally to manage it and give them all the tools they need to build out a detailed campaign and monitor and optimize it daily.

Google Earth adds a weather layer to maps

This is interesting. Google has partnered with weather.com and Naval Research Labs Meteorology labs to provide weather information on Google Earth maps. (maybe on gas pumps too?) I think this is very logical and makes perfect sense. I am suprised though with all the $ Google has that they didn’t launch some sattelites and provide weather on their own. This new way of doing business with partnerships is not the traditional way for Google. They like to own the technology for themselves and not outsource. So, I am curious if these other sources will be reliable enough and timley enough for google’s demands. It can’t be an easy job providing anything for Google, they are pretty perfect all the time and expect you to be too.

I wonder what Tom Skilling thinks of the new weather on Google earth?