Does this make results pages better? Would you be in favor of Google implementing this as a new design? Let us know in the comments.

Note: We’ve updated this article after people have had time to react to the test.

Google tests different things with its search interface all the time. Sometimes we cover the tests, and sometimes we don’t. Frankly there are just too many to keep track of. Matt Cutts has said that Google runs 20,000 search experiments a year.

This one is kind of interesting though, as it completely removes URLs from search results pages (apparently unless there is authorship involved). Tecno-Net tipped Search Engine Roundtable with a couple screen caps.

Here’s what it looks like on desktop:

And on mobile:

SER’s Schwartz posted about it on Search Engine Land here. It’s clear that this would not be a popular change if implemented. Here are a few sample comments from that article:

John Mitchell: “Hmm.. not sure if I like this as a user, I tend to look at the URLs in the results as there are some sites that I don’ trust even if Google does and places their pages in the results. In the examples above I’d probably be looking for the relevant page on the Microsoft site and there is no clue as to which result(s) that is.”

Liam Fisher: “Sounds like a huge way of opening the door to dodgy sites impersonating legitimate ones.”

Nick Boylan: “I wouldn’t like this at all. I glance at the URLs all the time, to determine the legit-ness of the source. Particularly if I’m looking for legal information or otherwise, or government services, etc.”

We’ve also gotten a few comments opposing the change:

Michele: “Worst Idea Ever!!! When I search for something, I have my own opinion about various sources – if google removes that information, I have to click through to determine that I don’t want to go there. Another case where I HATE it when technology thinks it’s smarter than I am.”

Vincent J. Eagan III: “Horrible idea! You need to see the URL so you know what kind of page it might be – otherwise it will be easy for scammers to set up pages.”

As Schwatz points out, the test is all being discussed a lot in the forums.

In Google’s own forum, one user writes, “I really hope that this isn’t a forerunner of a real change to the search results page – we’ve had too many of these recently, from the removal of the instant preview to the messing around with green arrows to see more information. Google needs to realise that people get used to and trust a particular format and anything different (like the Google+ merged results for example) only confuses people and makes them trust the results less.”

These are all valid points, and it’s hard to imagine Google implementing any change knowing that it could help spammers. It also makes the page less informative, which seems like a step in the wrong direction. Clearly most people who have seen the change aren’t wild about it.

Still, Google has made plenty of changes in the past with varying degrees of popularity. Recent changes to Google Image search seem to be quite unpopular with webmasters, for example.

What do you think? Should Google get rid of URLs on results pages? Share your thoughts.

Bing R&D Partner Architect Dr. Ronny Kohavi discussed Bing’s testing and findings in a blog post. Much of the findings seem pretty obvious. Clickthrough rates go down for results that are lower on the page, for example. Things get a little more interesting when users hit the back button, however, and this has influenced Bing’s strategy for showing results.

“On average, over 50% of users click on the first result on the page,” Kohavi writes. “From there we see a significant drop, with less than 1% of people clicking on the 8th link on the page. The figure below shows the click-through rate dropping from position 3 on, where position 3 could contain an Instant Answer, or the 2ndweb result that was pushed down because there was an Instant Answer above it, etc.”

“With this insight in mind, we looked for interesting cases where the click-through rate is much higher on lower results,” continues Kohavi. “One interesting case was after a user hits the back button. When users click on a result, then hit the browser back button, they typically look lower on the page. Statistics showed that the click-through rate on lower positions are a factor of five to eight times higher after a back button. This observation led to a change to Bing in the US in late May 2012 so that the SERP initially showed eight algorithmic results, and the page was extended to 12 after a back button. The controlled experiments showed that key metrics improved: users were executing fewer queries per session, pages rendered faster on average, and pagination to page 2, 3, etc. reduced by almost 2%.”

Now Bing is truncating search results pages more aggressively, showing just the first four elements (which can be either algorithmic results or instant answers), as well as as news results when relevant, and is extending the SERPs after the back button is pushed to 14 algorithmic results. According to Kohavi, this leads to more successful sessions for users, people finding what they’re looking for more quickly, a decline in queries per session, pages rendered faster (on average), and a 5% reduction in pagination.

The changes were pushed to all Bing users earlier this week (April 22nd, to be exact).

Interestingly, the number of video integrations has been reduced as well. Historically, video results have been the most frequently displayed form of Universal Search in Google’s results. On the flip side, there has been an increase in news integrations, in addition to an increase in news sources.

The study examines videos, images, maps, shopping and news in Universal Search.

“Turning to the analysis, there was hardly any change to the distribution of market shares before the spring,” the study’s authors write. “Video has long been the most important form of Universal Search integration, followed at some distance by image integrations and shopping results. Nearly all of the curves remain very stable until March/April, with one exception: the integration of videos peaked slightly after March, before falling back gently in July through August to the starting figure of the spring. Since then the percentage share of video integrations in Universal Search has fallen continuously.”

You can see an infographic about the study here.

[via Search Engine Land]

One example both point to is for York Fitness.

As Campbell points out, “Google has presented us with the page title ‘York Fitness: Gym Equipment & Machines | Weights | Boxing’ but the page title that York Fitness has set is ‘Gym Equipment & Machines | Weights | Boxing Equipment | York Fitness’ and truth be told, Google’s version of the page title looks far better.”

They appear to be doing the same thing on a variety of pages.

While it didn’t speak about the brand-specific method of retitling pages, Google has talked about its process for retitling pages in the past.

Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Pierre Far wrote on the Google Webmaster Central Blog over a year ago, “Page titles are an important part of our search results: they’re the first line of each result and they’re the actual links our searchers click to reach websites. Our advice to webmasters has always been to write unique, descriptive page titles (and meta descriptions for the snippets) to describe to searchers what the page is about.”

“We use many signals to decide which title to show to users, primarily the <title> tag if the webmaster specified one,” he continued. “But for some pages, a single title might not be the best one to show for all queries, and so we have algorithms that generate alternative titles to make it easier for our users to recognize relevant pages. Our testing has shown that these alternative titles are generally more relevant to the query and can substantially improve the clickthrough rate to the result, helping both our searchers and webmasters. About half of the time, this is the reason we show an alternative title.”

“Other times, alternative titles are displayed for pages that have no title or a non-descriptive title specified by the webmaster in the HTML,” he said. “For example, a title using simply the word “Home” is not really indicative of what the page is about. Another common issue we see is when a webmaster uses the same title on almost all of a website’s pages, sometimes exactly duplicating it and sometimes using only minor variations. Lastly, we also try to replace unnecessarily long or hard-to-read titles with more concise and descriptive alternatives.”

As far as brands go, brands are associated with trust and identity. We all know how important Google considers identity these days. A brand is the identity of a company or a product. Google seems to be be making sure content is clearly associated with the brand that puts it out.

Matt Storms1 day ago

Interesting SEO find today. If you have this with rel=publisher and schema star rating reviews you can take up some serious SERP real estate. Keep in mind I had to get past the page where you hide dead bodies on in Google which is page 3. Nobody goes to page 8 unless they are a SEO. 

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Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz pointed to the above post this morning, saying, “I am not sure if this is a PLA feature or if it is rich snippet related, I cannot reproduce it.”

Nor have we been able to.

Additionally, in the same post, Schwartz points to a couple of other apparent, less significant tests Google is doing, such as a font size adjustment on result links and the cached/similar links moved to a drop down box next to result links.

We’ve reached out to Google for comment, and will update if we receive one.

The product count feature could be a helpful feature for ecommerce businesses and users who want to browse the biggest selections (or who don’t want to spend time going through too many items).

Have you noticed errors in Google’s Knowledge Graph? Let us know in the comments.

Quality of the “knowledge” within the Knowledge Graph has been a question from the beginning. We asked Google after it launched how susceptible it would be to Wikipedia vandalism, given that Wikipedia is a major source of the info provided to the Knowledge Graph (though it’s only one of a variety of sources). At the time, a Google spokesperson told us, “I can’t share a ton of detail here, but we’ve got quality controls in place to try to mitigate this kind of issue. We’ve also included a link so users can tell us when we may have an inaccuracy in our information.”

“Our goal is to be useful; we realize we’ll never be perfect, just as a person’s or library’s knowledge is never complete,” he said. “But we will strive to be accurate. More broadly, this is why we engineer 500+ updates to our algorithms every year — we’re constantly working to improve search, and to make things easier for our users.”

Google is showing Knowledge Graph results for a whole lot of searches these days, and continues to expand the product all the time. Earlier this month, Google announced its expansion into more languages. You have to wonder how many errors are out there. It’s one thing for Google to try to deliver the best results in terms of other sites, but this is the information that is supposed to be “knowledge”.

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to a Google forum thread where somebody claiming to be the agent for NFL player Nick Eason found an error with the player’s Knowledge Graph entry, and asked to have it corrected:

I am writing to get some information removed from one of my Client’s biogrpahy’s that is sponsored by Google. When you search the name, NICK EASON in Google, a little biogprahy box comes up under his picture and under the Wikipedia blurb.

Nick is no longer married and desperately wants his Spouse tab removed. Can you please let me know the most efficeient and effective way to get this done? Thanks!

By the time this article was first written, it had remained unchanged, but Google has since fixed it.

Wikipedia appears to be the main source of Google’s “knowledge” about Eason. That’s the only source Google has labeled, anyway. When we checked, Eason’s Wikipedia page had no mention of his marriage or Regina Eason, who Google’s result said was his spouse (before finally updating it).

As Schwartz writes, “With web search, the results can be within minutes updated – extremely fresh. But the knowledge graph, if it needs an update, it can take months and months.”

A lot can change in that amount of time, obviously. Google, per its mission statement, wants to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible, but the ways in which it has been able to address the timeliness and/or freshness of data has left a great deal to be desired in recent years.

Google has placed such a great deal of emphasis on providing fresh search results, but then you have an example like this, where the result Google is actually emphasizing is simply outdated. Results, in general, have also become less fresh due to the lack of Google’s realtime search feature, which used to give you near-realtime content from Twitter as it appeared in the Twitterverse. This gave you fresh up to the second (or close to it at least) content about newsworthy topics right in your search results. Now, if you want that, you better just go to Twitter.

Meanwhile, Google is cramming organic search results with “fresh” content, often leaving more relevant content buried under the more recently written content. This was illustrated perfectly on the day of the Sandy Hook shooting, when reports came out that a person named Ryan Lanza was responsible for the horrible shooting in Newtown, Connecticut (granted, the killer was later reported to be Adam Lanza). If you tried searching Google for “Ryan Lanza,” you were likely getting little but few-minute-old reports, when you may have really been looking to find more about who this guy really was (a situation made even more confusing when media outlets started putting out photos and pointing to social media profiles for the wrong guy).

That has little to do with the Knowledge Graph, but it has everything to do with the relevance and usefulness of Google’s search results (which is being diminished in other areas of search as well).

One thing that’s mildly disturbing about this whole Knowledge Graph thing, in terms of the potential for errors, is that Google recently started including information about medications in the Knowledge Graph. This was an area of major concern as so-called “content farms” filled up Google’s search results with hardly credible articles about health issues. Google has made strides in that area, particularly with updates like Panda.

“This data comes from the U.S. FDA, the National Library of Medicine, and the Department of Veterans Affairs, among others,” said Google Search Senior Product Manager Aaron Brown of the recently added Knowledge Graph data. We hope you find this useful, but remember that these results do not act as medical advice.”

That last part is important.

Have Google’s search results gotten better since the launch of the Knowledge Graph? Have the results in general gotten better over the past year? Let us know what you think.

Early last year, in Google’s efforts clean up the quality of its search results, the search engine launched a feature that let users block domains from search results that they didn’t want to see in their future results. Tired of some content farm showing up every time you search for something? Go ahead and tell Google you don’t want results from that domain, and you should be all set.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for any sites frequently being blocked), Google doesn’t seem to be acknowledging these requests from users any longer. It’s unclear at this point whether this is or intentional or not, but it seems to be on the surface.

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to a Google Web Search help thread pointing out that users have been experiencing this issue for sometime, and was able to confirm that Google was not showing the feature in search results for him, and that blocking a site from Google’s “Blocked Sites” settings page also did not work.

We also confirmed this on our end. The feature in the actual results simply is not there, and blocking from the settings just isn’t working. I searched “how to tie a tie,” and blocked a domain from the settings. The settings page listed the domain as blocked afterwards, but the domain still appeared in the search results.

Note: Nothing personal against the site in the screenshot. Just a random test, which I removed from the blocked list.

We’ve reached out to Google for comment, and will update accordingly.

Google has been quietly making other changes to Search. Yesterday, we told you about Google’s changes to SafeSearch results, which were not accompanied by any announcement.

I’ve been using it since it was launched, and it’s been one of the biggest improvements to the Google results page in quite some time, in my opinion.

If you are also using the feature, you may notice that it now looks different, as Google has updated the design.

Last week, Google made some design changes to certain types of results on the desktop to match changes it recently made to the tablet search experience. Specifically, Google changed the way “quick answer” results look.

The changes to the Gmail/Google Drive results have a similar look.

Here’s what the results looked like before:

This week, Google also released a Chrome extension that lets you files from the web to Google Drive.

The left-hand side of the page is graced by the beloved Festivus Pole:

Here, Jerry Seinfeld and Frank Costanza explain:

Google has actually been celebrating Festivus for years. As far back as 2007, the Webmaster Tools team celebrated with the Feats of Strength and the Airing of Grievances.

[via Matt Cutts]

Today, Google is running a doodle for Ernie Coombs, also known as Mr. Dressup, on its homepage in Canada. This would have been an opportune time for Google to showcase its Knowledge Graph results for Coombs, but Google elected to go with “Mr. Dressup Ernie Coombs” as the query it points its users to. This query yields no Knowledge Graph results, as opposed to the query “Ernie Coombs” or the query “Mr. Dressup”.

The “Ernie Coombs” result is also interesting in that it offers a “more images” option, pointing searchers to Google image results for the query – a more visual than usual rendition of Google’s Knowledge Graph results.

Google has been pushing Knowledge Graph results at seemingly every turn. The feature is even the focal point of a new Google Search App ad. Its a little surprising that Google is not tailoring its Google doodle queries to point users to the results, especially when they’re readily available. You might say the feature would add value to Google as a homepage, which the company is even advertising about.

Coombs, a children’s entertainer from Canadian television, was born on this day in 1927. He died in 2001.