More Google Experiments in Search

Another day, another experiment from Google. Having looked at Google’s continued obsession with search speed and relevancy of search results, this blog post takes on a similar theme – minus the speed.

In another experiment with their ranking algorithm, Google are toying with the concept of displaying more than one search result from a single domain to a strong query. This would give a user a number of potential pages to choose – all from the same website.

More Results from a Single Search

The example that Google have used for this experiment is the Museum of Natural History’s website. If a user was looking for exhibitions from the museum then Google’s algorithm would recognise the strength of the query and display a number of pages pertaining to exhibitions from the museum. A Google statement read:

“Today we’ve launched a change to our ranking algorithm that will make it much easier for users to find a large number of results from a single site. For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site.”

Traditionally, only two results would be displayed but the example shows plenty of pages to choose from. Early signs suggest that this experiment won’t be greeted with open arms by webmasters.