The suggestions in Google Maps now include more information like the address of the business or the district that a place is in. "This extra information helps you find and select the exact business or location you’re seeking," say Engineer Steffen Meschkat and Product Manager Peter Lidwell.

"As a team based in our Zürich office, we understand the importance of getting information that is locally relevant," the pair says. "We’ve built this knowledge into Suggest for Google Maps so that you get the most useful suggestions depending on where you’re zoomed into on the map. For example, if you search for ‘Mandela’ in San Francisco, you’ll see items such as Mandela High School and businesses in nearby Oakland."

Those who are signed into their Google accounts and have their web history enabled can also see their personalized suggestions, based on past searches.

The suggestions feature is currently available to Google Maps users in China, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Taiwan, United States, and the United Kingdom. Google says it’s looking to expand it worldwide soon.

Original Article: Every now and then, someone spots an oddity in Google’s suggestions. Some are funny. Some are disturbing, and some are just weird. Alex Wilhelm at The Next Web has discovered an interesting behavior in Google Suggest involving religion.

With most major religions, you will get suggestions from Google when you type in a query like "example is". If you type "christianity is", or "judaism is" you will get suggestions (which some will no doubt find controversial in themselves), but when you type "islam is", you get nothing.

Here are a few screenshots for different examples of such queries:

To be fair, there are other religions that don’t yield suggestions, but all of the biggest ones besides Islam do.

The phenomenon has raised a few eyebrows. Wilhem himself says, "Google is systematically blocking, it seems, all search suggestions for Islam. Why? To remove the chance of an adherent of the faith from being offended by a perhaps severe search suggestion? Why not treat all search terms equally?"

He thinks that either "A: Google is horribly broken and this is evidence of that or B: They seem to be tampering with results."

Danny Sullivan, one of the most influential voices in the search industry weighed in on the conversation, saying, "Google is horribly broken. That’s my call. And they do such a piss poor job explaining why these types of things happen (sometimes not even trying at all) that it’s easier to believe B, that they’re tampering with search suggestions."

He points to a piece he wrote about Google Suggest and Climategate, "Many people are convinced that Google messed with the suggestions for that," says Sullivan. "Google was adamant they did not. I still believe they didn’t. I also can only tell you from covering Google over the years that things like this are far more likely to be because they are indeed screw ups than that they are intentionally aiming to do so."

A query for "islam is" returns about 3,140,000 results. Others have pointed out that there are no suggestions for queries like "Larry Page is" or "Sergey Brin is", although Sullivan is careful to point out that there are plenty for "Google is," and they’re not all the most positive things in the world.

What do you make of Google’s suggestions or lack thereof? Share your thoughts here.

We find that by providing suggestions upfront, we can help people search more efficiently and conveniently. Below are some great ways Google Suggest can help simplify your searching.

* Help formulate queries: Instead of just typing [hotels in washington] – did you want [hotels in washington dc] or [hotels in washington state]? Don’t remember that song title or person’s name? Let Google help you search (and yes, I ended up choosing “From This Moment” as our wedding song).

So how does this drastically change the keywords we will see in referrer logs? Well obviously we will see less misspellings. You can probably forget about optimizing for those. It was already difficult considering Google often used “Did you mean:” results for most misspellings.

* Reduce spelling errors: Since suggestions are spell-corrected using the same “Did you mean?” feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search, misspellings and typos can be corrected ahead of time. Instead of wasting your time with a misspelled query like [new yrok times] or [tomorow never dies], search the first time with the correctly-spelled query.

* Saves keystrokes: Who wants to spend their time typing [san francisco chronicle] when you can just type in “san f…” and choose the suggestion right away?

I think the biggest change will be losing long tail keywords. Where you would usually see 4-5 keyword phrases, searchers may opt to try the short tail version Google Suggests. Even is the user stays with a long tail query it more than likely will be one from Google Suggests and not and original one from the end searcher. I remember Google saying at least 25% of all searches never occurred before. We can expect this number to come way down now from this change. So why is Google doing this? Maybe they are trying to push AdWords inventory more? Obviously the shorter the tail the more chance someone is bidding for the keywords.

Look at the keyword “new york….”

Google offers some popular other new york phrases like new york yankees, new york times, etc. Providing this to the end searcher drastically changes your searching habits/behaviors. You were looking for one thing and now Google can or has essentially offered you other suggestions to change your mind. Completely changes the query landscape.

If you happen to rank for one of those Google Suggested queries get ready for a LOT more traffic.

High Rankings discussion continues here:

End Of Optimising For Spelling Errors, Google Suggest goes live

What do you think?

Comments

Algorithmic tweaks for faster information processing make the search result suggestions appearing at Google a more timely prospect.

The announcement of fresher suggestions in Google’s search results pages got lost in the shuffle yesterday, when the company disclosed its search ad agreement with Yahoo. Despite that headline grabbing item, plenty of people continue to work on improving what has become the dominant search presence on the Internet.

“You won’t see related search suggestions for every query, and while they are usually shown below the search results, the algorithm sometimes causes them to display above the search results,” Google said.

Current hot topics like the salmonella threat to the tomato crop, or the start of the US Open, for example, pop related search suggestions atop the Google page. Each clickable link leads to dedicated results for the query.

A query for “yahoo google” didn’t return any search suggestions there, despite the recency of the latest news about the ad serving agreement between the two companies. Google’s fast on its indexing, but perhaps not sub-24 hours fast yet. Give it time.

Currently when you mail yourself something you get this at the bottom of the email

Pretty useful and helpful, however the email a story could use some options, like say for example allowing me just to send the URL. Why would I want to do that, so I could use twittermail to email things to my twitter account. This becomes even more useful for those of us who run/manage multiple websites with role accounts. Sure I could just click through, open the URL, copy the url and change tabs to webmail and copy and paste it, but just think how much better, faster, easier it would be, if I could do it natively in Google reader.

Google’s also trying really hard to get into bookmarking space with their latest attempt Google shared stuff. How about adding that functionality into the bottom of Google reader. You could take it a step further by integrating the bookmarlet functions for popular services like Digg, Mixx, Propeller, Delicious, Sk-rt, Hugg, stumbleupon and others. Just don’t get all creepy and require people to give you the login info, just replicate the bookmarklet functionality.

Steve Rubel has an interesting series on turning GMail into your personal nerve center (part 2). I know you recently added search functionality to Google Reader as well. Well how about taking it a step further and realizing what Steve is trying to do and merging the Google reader search into Google desktop search. While we’re at it hey Ken Norton of Google Documents, can I lobby for adding Google documents into Google desktop search too? C’mon I know you guys can do it you’ve got Gmail married into Google desktop search already.

Comments

I thought it would be fun to walk through a few of their products and give them my ‘How I’d Improve This Product’ dealio, so here goes.

1. Mail

Make it Zimbra

2. Calendar

Make it Google Cal… Nah, just kidding, but the functionality of Google Cal should be their aim. At present it doesn’t seem like the Y! Calendar is getting much product attention, since it is far from something I’d use. I’d suggest, off the top of my head:

1. Making it sync via iCal. Right now when you click sync it tries to sync your mail from other services and that’s retarded.

2. Adding in contexts (always fun to go all GTD).

3. Allowing imports from other services. Lower the barrier to entry.

4. Ajax. Otherwise, it’s useless.

5. Photos. Why are they asking you if you want to add photos to your calendar? Who the heck does that?

6. Connected Devices… What is this supposed to do? When I click it I get an error message that it’s unavailable.

3. Yahoo Music

As a moron who has a Mac as my primary computer and a Zune as my primary listening device (I know…), no music service is going to completely please me. That said, they’ve done a huge overhaul and the result is a much cleaner and cooler look, incorporating Upcoming and other cool stuff (where’s MyBlogLog?), but if they want me to be able to use them, Y! Music really should:

1. Be compatible with a Mac. I mean I have a PC too, but it would be cool to be able to use the service on my Mac as well. I get a message that I should ‘upgrade’ to Vista or XP, LOL. Upgrade? Not even close…

2. Make Zune one of their devices. I pay Microsoft $15 per month for the privilege of using Zune.net and I’d rather use Yahoo!, especially at $6-8 per month, and I don’t have that option right now, although apparently I can use my phone. What is up with that?

3. Make the call to action a little more noticeable. I just spent 5 minutes trying to figure out how to download the client, before I noticed the really small ad in the bottom right-hand corner. Tsk-Tsk

4. Groups

I’ve seen some of the changes coming to groups, and me likee. However, I’d also add that calendar, and perhaps even upcoming, should really get tied into that product, for maximum usefulness. As well, groups and message boards both seem like a natural fit for our little widget, but then again, if it were up to me it’d be on every page at Yahoo!

Well, I’ve wasted enough time listing what-ifs today. If I have some time in the coming weeks, I’ll try to do this again. If you create something similar, let me know and I’ll link to it. I love to read product reviews and ideas.

Comments

Tag:

More other languages, I should say – the search giant had already made some efforts in this area.  But thanks to the latest release, “Query suggestions are now available in about 40 languages worldwide,” according to Edmond Lau’s post on the Official Google Blog.

It’s worth noting that Turkish is among the languages with which Google has become familiar, and one can’t help but wonder how Turkey’s problems with YouTube did (or didn’t) affect the inclusion of its official language.

To return to the main event, though, Lau went on to state, “If you don’t see them in your country, we’re working on getting them to you soon,” and it was worth pointing out, “You won’t see these suggestions all the time; we only present them when we think they are relevant and useful.”

Aside from the inherent “niceness” of this move, it’s not liable to hurt Google’s market share in any of the target countries.

Yahoo’s been rolling out some of the changes recently, but on Tuesday they all came together. There’s already been a lot of coverage and instead of trying to repeat what’s been said I’ll leave you with the links towards the bottom of this post. However the best way to see the changes is by going to Yahoo and searching.

SEO Related Observations About Search Assist

In using search assist the last couple of days a couple of things have become clear to me. The first is that whether they realize it or not people will be performing more long tail searches. The second is that when search assist is open one less organic search result is visible above the fold.

In the above image you can see search assist in action for the single word ‘cavern.’ The phrases on the left are search suggestions and one of the nice features is that cavern doesn’t need to be at the beginning of the suggested phrases. The two columns of phrases to the right are concepts around the word cavern you can explore.

As an aside you might notice the Beatles as one of the concepts and it might seem strange for it to be there, but the Beatles got their start playing at The Cavern club in Liverpool. Just a little trivia for you non Beatles folks.

Getting back to the cavern search I selected Howe Caverns from the suggestions on the left and then selected ‘adventure tour’ in the concepts that showed up.

You can see that Yahoo is now showing results containing adventure tour. While it doesn’t show in the search box the actual search now being performed is

howe caverns + “adventure tour”

Notice that adventure tour is being searched in quotes as an exact match while the howe caverns part of the search isn’t. The query above is somewhat more complex than a user will typically type on their own. It’s not overly complicated, but now thanks to search assist we’ll be seeing more advanced searches that will go deeper into the search tail.

Combined with the observation that one less result will be in front of people (at 1024 x 768 resolution one organic result is visible) I think it becomes more important to optimize for long tail queries for Yahoo traffic. It may not be enough to simply have all the words on the page either as the second half of the query is an exact match.

As you start to use search assist more your attentions naturally ends up more focused more at the top of the page on search assist itself. If you don’t see a good result quickly you may decide to further refine the search as opposed to digging deeper into the results and clicking beyond the first page. It wouldn’t surprise me to see less results being clicked, but more clicks leading to good results. That would likely lead to more satisfied Yahoo users.

Long tail optimization has been good advice for awhile now. Search Assist makes the advice better and should also require more focused long tail optimization. Additionally with one less organic result showing the paid listings take on a greater percentage of the space. It’s very possible Yahoo will start seeing more clicks on their ads.

Suggestions For Search Assist

I’d like to see Yahoo display the actual search being performed when using search assistant. In the above howe caverns + “adventure tour” search why not show the entire search in the search box? Showing the actual search would help users better understand what is happening and it would educate them about advanced search operators. If Yahoo tested the idea and found users were more confused by seeing the search change I could understand, but otherwise I think it would be a nice touch.

Exploring concepts is a great addition and I wonder if it could be expanded one more level. Instead of only exploring concepts around the original search why not allow exploration around the more advanced modified search. It would add one more level of refinement and for Yahoo it would keep more people on Yahoo’s search results page

If possible I wouldn’t mind seeing more advanced search operators gain inclusion in search assist. Right now search assist will include an exact match phrase on top of your initial search. Perhaps they could add a way to exclude certain words or phrases as well.

Resources

These are some of the posts I had been collecting for tomorrow’s This Week In SEO post. If you haven’t yet spent any time with Yahoo’s search assist the posts below will fill you in more about how it works and the general changes Yahoo made. Eric Lander’s Search Optimization Guide will walk you through a variety of the changes and how they relate to seo.

• Yahoo Search Launches Google Killer : Search Assist, Videos, Flickr Integration
• Search Optimization Guide for The New Yahoo! Search
• Yahoo Upgrades Search Experience, Launches ‘Search Assist’ & Multimedia Content In Results
• Yahoo Search Launches Search Assist & Blended Search Results
• Yahoo Search Gets Blended, Helpful
• Yahoo Launches New Search Interface
• Yahoo’s Showcased Homepage Content Driving Search Results
• Yahoo’s Search Assist and tracking keywords
• Yahoo! Leveraging “Content” for Queries
• Blended Search, it’s everywhere I look

If you haven’t yet tried it, give Yahoo’s Search Assist a spin and let me know what you think. I’ve been a Google user primarily for years, but I’ve noticed over the last couple of days I’ve been using Yahoo a little more than I have been and I have a hunch that’s going to increase.

Comments

Click a link to submit a link. The link open a form where you need to login.

Google explains: “If you click yes, we’ll save this suggestion with your Google Account so we can use it to improve your search results. This is an experimental feature and, based on this experiment, we may come up with other improvements in the future. Like all data in your Account, your suggestions are subject to our Privacy Policy. If you want to delete one of the suggestions from your account, just repeat your search and click "withdraw" next to the saved result.”

After the submission of the new URL is done, it takes you to a 404 page that is at http://www.google.com/reviews/w/nominate.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

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Comments

Mattis wanted to help, and offered suggestions on the Yahoo Search Marketing blog. He’s provided a list for site publishers that emphasizes a simple, direct approach to presenting information.

Staying on target and cutting clutter don’t have to yield a boring site. Mattis recommended complementing a site’s offerings with tips and suggestions, which can yield cross-selling opportunities.

Likewise, a little interactivity can be a good thing. Unless you’re director of programming at someplace like Shockwave or AddictingGames, too much interactivity can detract from the marketing message.

Some publishers will disagree with his final suggestion regarding calls to action. Mattis said ‘Submit’ and ‘Buy Now’ may put some people off, but conventional thinking seems to indicate those phrases work well.

Site publishers may want to try the milder call to action Mattis recommended, just to see if it has an impact on conversions. It can always be changed later.