Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Search within a site: A tale of teleportation



Have you ever forgotten the exact address of a site that you wanted to visit? Not a problem - just type the name of the site into the Google search box and hopefully it appears at the top of the search results page.

We call this "teleporting", and we're pleased that we have been able to minimize the need to remember an alphabet soup of .coms, .nets, and .orgs out of everyone's lives. However, one of the trends we noticed while studying teleporting was that there were lots of searchers who would type the name of a specific website as if they wanted to teleport, but would then immediately issue another more a refined search within this site.

For example, if someone is looking for official information about the Hubble Space Telescope on the NASA website, one might first search for [NASA] and then [NASA Hubble Telescope], like this:



Through experimentation, we found that presenting users with a search box as part of the result increases their likelihood of finding the exact page they are looking for. So over the past few days we have been testing, and today we have fully rolled out, a search box that appears within some of the search results themselves. This feature will now occur when we detect a high probability that a user wants more refined search results within a specific site. Like the rest of our snippets, the sites that display the site search box are chosen algorithmically based on metrics that measure how useful the search box is to users.

We hope that you will make use of the site search box in order to get the information you're looking for as quickly and easily as possible.

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