Is Google setting the standard for enterprise search or is it the other way round?

Gordon Hotchkiss recently posted an article discussing their eye tracking studies and how Google is setting the standard for search results presentation. This talks about the information ’scent’ in search results pages, with the scent strongest at the top and bolding adding cues that help with scanning. The footnote asserts that enterprise search needs to match the standard set by Google.

I agree with that but think that enterprise search is able to add a lot more scent to the search results page because it has access to structured meta-data. In particular images. As far as information scent goes an image reeks a thousand bolded words. Other meta data such as category, brand, and price can be included in the search results and add additional information scents for the person scanning the results. Compare the results of Edwin Watts site search to a Google site restricted search for the same term. Enterprise search is also able to provide more comprehensive indexing and less duplicates.

Will the images and other meta data that you see in enterprise search eventually influence the look and feel of Google and other search engines? Over the years various search engines have tried incorporating thumbnails to include this visual scent - but it has really never taken off. Google desktop search includes thumbnails but the problem with them is they are too small to see the relevant images on the page. Ask.com gets around this by showing larger images when you hover over the binoculars icon. However that doesn’t help the scanner.

Google does have a lot of these images - both for their image search and from the data they get from merchants listed in Froogle. Will we eventually see some of these images in the main Google results? Claria have teamed with Ditto to add images and logos to Yahoo sponsored results on their searchscout property. I think the result is an enhanced search experience.

This entry was posted by Shaun Ryan on Tuesday, February 14th, 2006 at 6:56 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.