The new Google search results pages have taken some getting use to – personally I am not that big a fan of them – yet.
However along with the the new design seems to have come a new feature, one that seems to be a hit and miss
As you can see , Google have introduced a ‘something different’ feature on the search pages, something which is a bit hit and miss as you can see below.
A search for SMX produces a slightly more … confusing set of suggestions
However, one area this could become interesting on is on brand searches. Similar to recent PPC changes, this would allow competitors to potentially get a foothold on competitor brand searches. Take for example this search for Mediavest:
This appears to be confined to .com searches at the minute – certainly a number of .co.uk searches didnt appear to trigger this on searches. However its one I personally don’t feel adds any significant value to the results – and in certain instances actually reduces the perceived relevance of the results (take for advantage the SMX result highlighted above).
As a sidenote it does serve to highlight potentially how Google groups keywords with regards to keyword evaluation.
