Google brand links: organic results to head further south? 9
Google appears to be trialling some new related-search links over at Google.com - a list of "brands for ..." when you search for products. (Update: official confirmation).
So search for digital cameras at google.com (NB not everyone sees this, so it must be some sort of experiment) and it shows, immediately under the search box, "brands for Canon Olympus Sony Nikon Kodak" - where each is a link (leading to a search result for your original search term plus the brand name). Like this screenshot.
New "brands for" links
US now - UK in the future?
Click these screenshots to see them full size. Or squint and you'll see these extra links above the news, which is above the shopping results - all of which are pushing the natural results way down the page.
How the US results look when you search for digital cameras
Here's another example, also featuring a local search box, too, for mattresses.
Mattresses: brand list, local search box, the lot ...
And here's one for cheap laptops - Google associates the brands Dell, Acer, HP, ASUS and Apple with this search term. It's editorialising now! (And Apple, really?!?)
Brands for cheap laptops: Dell Acer HP ASUS Apple
Oooh and Katie Clarke pointed out an interesting one: car (as with all these, click to see it bigger). That gives smart as the first option. Lucky them!
Cars: smart comes first
UK now
The current UK results
The shape of things to come? (You might like my previous post on the new look google local results and the implications for natural search).
This is Very Bad News for small traders & e-commerce sites. Google seems intent on keeping people on their sites for longer, and giving big brands some luvin' (maybe to avoid lawsuits or somesuch), and this'll have devastating effects on smaller websites. Casualties of war and all that.
Nice, I would guess they look are the related searches to understand who is a related brand.
Re barry's comment I would say that there is now a greater need for companies to promote their brand pages e.g. http://www.example.com/brand/sony/
as you'll get more people searching for "sony digital cameras"
This is bad news all round for brands of all sizes - not only will smaller brands be squeezed out but would Canon and Sony want to be associated with specific keyword searches such as "cheap digital cameras"?
Google seems to be just filling the listings with more and more (monetary driven)distractions from the organic - it's sad.
@adrian berry but that then produces more searches for "{brand} cheap digital cameras". That's where you need to target.
It's a similar on Bing where on the top left they give suggested searches, it all depends if people are clicking the suggestions.
I'd love to know where they're getting the data from - I'd like to think that they're getting most of their data from Google Products (if you search for "toys" you get Star Wars, among other things) and a lot of those appear within Google Products. If they used Products then it would let them use data from ratings too, so they know which brands have more positive reviews so that they can list the more popular brands. It doesn't look like all of their data is coming from Google Products though, as there's a few examples where one or two of the brands appearing in the SERPs aren't listed in Products.
I'm fairly certain it's not manual though, unless they have someone there typing in brands for "shower curtain rods"...
Shower curtain rods. LOL. Crate & Barrel appear for lots of household goods I tried (rugs, mugs, chairs, beds). Dunno if that's a clue, or C&B just sell household goods!
@Dave
I initially suspected that they'd pull quality signals from Google products. It might be a mix of a handfull of signals that they use. It must be scalable, i very much doubt that there are any 'handjobs' involved. Maybe in the initial test phase but that's it. Reminds me a bit of the rankings in Google local where noone is entirely sure yet what the ranking algo is. Or has someone finally figured that out? ; )
I said before to Malcolm that, if you use a small laptop, the first organic search result appears at the very bottom of the page and you have to scroll to have a look at the top 5 organic results. I am beginning to get a bit annoyed with this. Hello Bing???
I wrote about this last night and how it's going to kill Online Businesses.
I'm surprised that Google is even doing this
http://sphinn.com/story/148492
I thought you'd blog about this when you were ReTweeting things yesterday!
It's a very bad move by Google. The reason people use them is that their organic listings are great. Now they're showing me a directory page before I get to those listings!