fantomNews™ — the ultimate know

(rt) Andy Beal of Search Engine Lowdown reports having struck on a new Google feature: seems that some users will be displayed a graphical “Try alternate searches” option. When you click on it, it will take you to a page offering other suggested keyword searches.

In the example he displays screenshots for, the suggested (“Try searching for:”) search terms were “desktop computer”. The offered alternatives were “computer support” and “computer buying guide” with three links each plus, somewhat disconcertingly, “free destop wallpaper” (no further links documented). The final block (again, not displayed in the screenshot) covered, relevantly enough, “desktop computer prices”.

SEO /SEM “elder statesman” (no age quip intended – the French term doyen would probably describe it more adequately), while not being able to reproduce this result himself (and neither could we, for that matter), opines that it may be a test on Google’s part limited for the time being to a fairly small group of searchers.

Of course, this would tie in rather nicely with the prevailing search industry assumption that Google is heading – as will all major search engines rather sooner than later – for a chock full of improved ranking algorithms focused on
→ Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), → Correspondence Analysis and related linguistic disciplines, not to say tricks, quite a few of which are already in place within the confines of their AdWords and AdSense programs.

In short, they seem to be very keen on pushing what we have chosen to term → Context Delivery as a generalized tag to cover the majority of linguistic approaches, processes and methods involved.

It stands to reason that not only will Google want to test the quality of their search results against this new fangled approach – a factor of no lesser importance will obviously be searchers’ acceptance of this feature.

But lest we forget: Andy does mention the fact that there’s also a remote possibility of some sophisticated spyware at work here …

Read Andy’s original post here:
→ “Google Testing ‘Alternate Searches’?”

And here’s Danny’s take on this matter:
→ “Google Testing New Related Searches & Clustering System?”

As for where Google may be heading overall, check out our earlier post:
↗ Where Google Is Heading – the Final Road Map?

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