Search Engines

Per an announcement on its Lat Long blog, Google is now allowing businesses to respond to consumer reviews within Google Places listings. Google Places, formerly known as the Local Business Center, was launched in April and provides businesses with the ability to get found, communicate with customers and provide real-time updates and offers.

Prior to Google Places, a brand’s local business information was viewable only in a Google Map bubble within search results. With the advent Google Places, a permanent HTML page and Google web address become available for places and businesses (see images below).

Caption: Google Map listing with reviews (appears within search results)

Caption: Google Place Pages are permanent HTML pages that contain additional information about venues, as well as maps, photos, reviews and more.

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It’s been a year since Microsoft unveiled its new “Decision Engine,” Bing, amid a flurry of hype and speculation. Microsoft said the new engine was developed to help searchers navigate more easily through information online – an objective perhaps most vividly captured in the company’s slew of commercials poking fun at “search overload.”

Bing, which was fully rolled out on June 3, 2009, claimed to take a new approach to search through three simple goals (as articulated in the official release): deliver great results, deliver a more organized experience and facilitate fast, more confident decisions through search. Beyond that, Microsoft’s new engine sported a sleek design, with large, vibrant visuals extending across the homepage. Both inside and out, Bing was striving to be different.

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People have long been turning to the web to find information — and as social and mobile continue to gain momentum, this trend will only increase. More and more of today’s searchers want late-breaking information that answers their queries with the greatest relevancy. In other words, they want the engines to tell them what’s going on right now for a given topic.

Search engines have responded to this demand by incorporating real-time search results into their offerings. One engine leading the way is OneRiot, a real-time search engine that provides results influenced by what people are sharing on Twitter, Myspace, Digg, Facebook and more. We interviewed Tobias Peggs, President of OneRiot, to learn more about the engine and the future of real-time search.

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[360i]: Since OneRiot launched, the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) have incorporated more real-time search functionality. How will OneRiot compete against them and stand out?

[Tobias Peggs]: Across all search engines, studies have shown that 40% of users’ queries are best served by realtime search results. These satisfy users searching for things as heavyweight as “Oil Spill” or as entertaining as “Lindsay Lohan.” Those users are expecting their search engine to tell them what’s going on right now for that topic. That’s exactly what OneRiot provides. We find the news, stories and videos that are really resonating with people right now for any topic. In addition we offer a partner API that enables 3rd party search engines to show our results to their users. We also operate the RiotWise network specifically for monetizing realtime search results – both on our own site and our partners’ properties.

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If you’ve conducted a simple search within Google lately – which, let’s face it, you probably have – you may have noticed a new and different variety of result type.  This type of result, one that has been labeled as “One Box”, “Snippets” or “Short Answers,” is becoming more persistent within the engine.  And no matter what Google decides to officially name these types of quick results, you can expect to see more of them in the future.

Whether you want to calculate a simple math equation or solve measurement conversions, Google is streamlining your answers. For example, if you have air travel plans, you can search Google for your airline flight status.  If you are interested in music, you can query your favorite music artists or songs. You can also search for new movie showings or times, and dates of birth or death.  Given the volume of these one-off searches, Google is aiming to increase user satisfaction by speeding up its delivery of the basic information we seek.

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Last week Google released its eighth user interface redesign to the world – the search giant’s most notable overhaul since the Universal Search shake up in May 2007. This latest iteration builds upon its enhanced search options released over a year ago and draws upon an extensive user testing regimen initiated last fall.

Reportedly, Google has been testing features that were included since 2006 – and 360i’s search team has been observing such refinements in the wild for quite some time. Without getting bogged down into the fine details of the re-design, we discuss the motivations behind Google’s evolution, and underline the opportunities and ramifications they entail to marketers.

What about all that jazz?

Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience, told search industry pundit Danny Sullivan, that Google’s results were too free form; she went on to describe them as “user interface jazz.” This jazz boils down to Google’s incremental enrichment of its search results with further result types (news, images, local, video, etc.) and query refinement options (time constraints, nearby, more shopping results, wonder wheel, etc.). Indeed, arch-rival search engine Bing relaunched its search engine to include a similar faceted left navigation device increasing its share of US search queries by 3.5% to 11.7% since June 2009.

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In last week’s post about Google Places, we took a high-level look at the platform and what it offers to businesses looking to improve local visibility in Google. In today’s post, we’ll continue to explore Google Places in terms of user interaction, extra features, as well as some limitations it presents for marketers seeking to optimize hundreds or thousands of locations.

First off, let’s take a look at all of the ways consumers can interact with businesses in Google Places.

How users interact with Google Places

It should now seem clear that maintaining local information through Google Places will improve control of a brand’s visibility in Google Search, including:

Web Search (Universal Listings)

These predominant local “universal” listings, often seen through a standard web search, significantly influence the local visibility for brands, aiding direct search traffic to the brand’s website (via the A, B, C links seen below).  Plus, users clicking on the link just below the main hyperlink –perhaps seeking details like user reviews, hours of operation, directions and more — will be sent to a corresponding Google Place page to get the information, in contrast to the brand’s website.

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2010 is shaping up to be the year of local search, with so much focus on mobile and social check-ins, geo-targeted tweets and a general shift of consumer behavior that makes them more inclined to post and search content with more geo-relevance. According to Google, web users spend one million hours browsing its Maps and Earth products everyday.  Amid this flurry of local updates within the industry, the Google Local Business Center (LBC) has recently changed its name to, “Google Places”.

The update is a fresh way to bring more attention to this Google platform.  In addition, the new management platform aligns with their original concept of Google Places, announced in September 2009.

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