Google's Advanced Search Redesign Does Little For Average User

I'm always suprised when Google makes a change to an existing product. Maybe it's because of all the rumors that I've heard about how the search engine giant is a little cocky about how well they know their technology. Or maybe it's because I use their services so much that even the slightest modification rocks my world.

That was what it was like the other day when I went to use Google's Advanced Search. I wanted to do a site-specific search. When I got to the page I found that the entire page had been redesigned. "But why?" I thought. "They've moved everything around."

Then I looked at the page from a developer's standpoint. It is certainly cleaner. The old interface had so many fields and almost as many dropdowns. It looked like it could have been devised by the IRS.

It turns out that Google was targeting that interface with the redesign. According to the Google Operating System blog, "Google's Daniel Russell said that 50% of the people who open the Advanced Search page leave it without completing the search." Russell apparently hinted that the exits "most likely [are] because they [the users] are overwhelmed by the Advanced Search interface."

If you ask me, though, Google didn't take this redesign far enough. Yes, cleaning up the interface was helpful. But who did it help? The 0.5% of users who already know how to use advanced search features. Sun Microsystems Director of Web Technologies Tim Bray says:

The people who do use Advanced Search are your most fanatical users, the professional librarians, spooks, and private investigators. And the ones who will do what it takes to find out everything about research on the rare disease their child just got diagnosed with (1).

The average user on the other hand, often doesn't fully understand how a search engine works in the first place. According to usability expert Jacob Nielsen, "many users don't understand how search engines prioritize their listings, and some users don't even know that the euphemistic label 'sponsored links' refers to paid advertisements.(2)."

Google has an Advanced Search Tips page, but I found instructions from a site called Google Guide to be much less intimidating and more hands-on for the beginner.

How can Google improve the usability on the Advanced Search page itself? I have a radical response to that question. But I'll blog more on that tomorrow.

ALT Tags According To Google's Matt Cutts

I had been doing a lot of research about how to properly tag images since the summer when I read an article in Digital Web about Google Universal Search. There was suprisingly little information available at the time, considering how big social photo sites like Flickr have become.

Finally, Google is speaking vis a vis Matt Cutts -- head of Google's webspam team. In Cutt's ALT tag video he talks about how you can use ALT tags to tell Google more about what is in an image file and boost it's page ranking.

Here are some highlights:

1. Including ALT text with your images will help Google to better identify its contents



2. ALT tags do not need to be long. Cutts' tag was 7 words. Even 25 is too much.



3. An ALT tag used in conjuction with a descriptive filename (cat.jpg versus ds134.jpg, for example) will improve the searchability of your images even more

Quality photos can be found on social bookmarking aggregator site PicURLs

I began work on a site earlier this year that an excellent photo gallery, but hadn't yet explored any SEO tactics to promote it. My first instint was to look at getting the images on one or more of the social bookmarking sites--specifically Flickr because another site I had worked on in the past had gotten a lot of exposure when we posted our images with them.



One of the questions I got about the images users would be provided if they typed in a keyword like Wall Street or Microsoft Windows was "How do you know what kind of image is going to come up." The truth is that there is a lot of randomness. A hundred images can be tagged "Wall Street," but of those about 50-60 are probably not relevant to the user's search and another 20 or so are of such poor quality that they shouldn't have been uploaded in the first place.



But now there is PicURLs, a site that aggregates photos from the nine most popular photo social bookmarking sites and displays the most popular images for each site so that only quality photographs and well-tagged images are shown. This only works if users tag photos well and appropriately. But I have faith in the users of social media. While some tag photos indescriminately to gain exposure, many understand how important good tags are to user experience. And that is why I think we will be seeing a lot more from PicURLs, and other aggregators like it, in days to come.

Posting Duplicate Content Must Be Harmful To Our Google Ranking

I am responsible for content development for one Web site that has taken an inexplicable dive in traffic over the past two and a half months and after scores of conference calls with everyone in the company from IT to SEO to the head of metrics we still haven't been able to figure it out. One thing we have been able to isolate is the fact that over the years the magazine has changed the domain a couple of times before finally deciding on its current URL a few years ago. I rediscovered this Google blog "Dealing deftly with duplicate content" today which has some helpful tips, but am suprised at the writer's last comment:

Don't worry be happy: Don't fret too much about sites that scrape (misappropriate and republish) your content. Though annoying, it's highly unlikely that such sites can negatively impact your site's presence in Google. If you do spot a case that's particularly frustrating, you are welcome to file a DMCA request to claim ownership of the content and have us deal with the rogue site.

With Google cracking down on all the rogue linking schemes one can't help but think that maybe this employee isn't in touch with reality. Maybe this post is just out of date. In any event, the other tips are very helpful. Here they are:

• Block appropriately: Rather than letting our algorithms determine the
  "best" version of a document, you may wish to help guide us to your preferred
  version. For instance, if you don't want us to index the printer versions of
  your site's articles, disallow those directories or make use of regular
  expressions in your robots.txt file.
  
• Use 301s: If you have restructured your
  site, use 301 redirects ("RedirectPermanent") in your .htaccess file to smartly
  redirect users, the Googlebot, and other spiders.
  
• Be consistent: Endeavor to
  keep your internal linking consistent; don't link to /page/ and /page and
  /page/index.htm.
  
• Use TLDs: To help us serve the most appropriate version of a document, use top level domains whenever possible to handle country-specific content. We're more likely to know that .de indicates Germany-focused content, for instance, than /de or de.example.com.
  
• Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, make sure they include a link back to the original article on each syndicated article. Even with that, note that we'll always show the (unblocked) version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you'd prefer.
  
• Use the preferred domain feature of webmaster tools: If other sites link to yours using both the www and non-www version of your URLs, you can let us know which way you prefer your site to be indexed.
  
• Minimize boilerplate repetition: For instance, instead of including lengthy copyright text on the bottom of every page, include a very brief summary and then link to a page with more details.
  
• Avoid publishing stubs: Users don't like seeing "empty" pages, so avoid
  placeholders where possible. This means not publishing (or at least blocking)
  pages with zero reviews, no real estate listings, etc., so users (and bots)
  aren't subjected to a zillion instances of "Below you'll find a superb list of
  all the great rental opportunities in [insert cityname]..." with no actual
  listings.
  
• Understand your CMS: Make sure you're familiar with how content is
  displayed on your Web site, particularly if it includes a blog, a forum, or
  related system that often shows the same content in multiple formats.
  

Everything you need for Googlebot to work correctly

It seems that the bloggers at Google have been talking a lot about Googlebot, so I am going to do a little link roundup and maybe come back and do a post or two about one aspect of Googlebot or another. Having read each of these entries in detail, it seems that taken as a group a Web developer or Webmaster should have just about everything they need to make sure Googlebot is functioning correctly on their site.

1. All about Googlebot - Q&As about about robots.txt files and Googlebot's behavior fielded by Google Webmaster Central founder Vanessa Fox.




2. How to verify Googlebot - Google SEO specialist Matt Cutts talks about how to determine a bot is authentic.




3. Learn more about Googlebot's crawl of your site and more! - Vanessa Fox discusses new additions to Google Webmaster tools meant to help the Webmaster track the bot better.




4. Googlebot activity reports - Google blogger explains how the company tracks the amount of traffic between Google and a given site.




5. Better details about when Googlebot last visited a page - Vanessa Fox breaks this very confusing subject into excellent detail.