Thursday, July 31, 2008

Semantic Search Post 6: Google Response

Doubtless Google has 927 people working on semantic search, but their first response to this trend, secondary search option, didn’t go down to well with the online retailers that are the bread and butter of their paid search business.

Secondary search works like this: You get a search result and with it a tiny window that lets you search the site of a major retailer as a drill down. Retailers generally ain’t happy because it means that users spend more time on Google and less time on their properties, and because secondary search results can also include competitor ads that could drive people who might otherwise buy from the main retailer to another site.

It’s a very rudimentary semantic approach – it’s essentially applying semantic principles to NAVIGATIONAL search. But there’s gotta be more coming. We’ll see what happened in the months ahead.

This post from TechCrunch points out the tremendous controversy that secondary search has created.

Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to write.

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