Google Search News

http://www.google.com/microsoft.html

Google may be testing this searchbox as a way of seeing whether searchers looking for Microsoft might benefit from having the Microsoft search right there.

Moderator note: TFL (Transport for London) is an OK example, as it's a government agency. Let's leave other specific company names out of this discussion, except for very large well-known companies like Amazon. We can discuss examples by size, though.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:22 pm (utc) on Mar. 4, 2008]

When you used the search box it displayed all relevant indexed results for the domain within google.

Interesting...

It does look a little perculiar on the normal Google serps

A horizontal ad link to the site followed by what would be their normal serp result with 8 sitelinks then underneath a windows style textbox with a ruddy great big grey windows button entitled searcgh www.examplesite.com. It looks really tacky and not very google.

The results are actually
example search :www.examplesite.com

Image results! first

The fact is that I do not like the idea of giving more real state to the first result, but if has to be like these, just for really important sites, I think is an improvement for the average joe.

To get the search box, you need to search for the company/ organization/ or agency name, or the domain name with the tld, not always the way you'd enter a site.

Also, this only seems to be affecting very large or very high traffic sites, and definitely not all of them. Eg, irs.gov gets a box, albeit site:irs.gov shows only about 69,000 pages.

On the other hand, site:webmasterworld.com shows roughly 3.2 million pages, and doesn't get a search box.

site:un.org shows roughly 2.3 million pages, and does, as noted above, get a box.

But there are many major corporations and ecommerce sites with page counts in the millions that don't show up.

For Microsoft in the US, which, as noted, does return a box, site:microsoft.com shows some 16-million pages.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you... but just to play devil's advocate here, is this any more slippery than Sitelinks? You could almost describe this as Sitelinks on steroids.

Plus Google already offered Site Search on websites. It's like taking it off the sites and putting it back on Google.com.

Clean enough format. Very simple and efficient. It's better than "More Results from [this site]."

+1

p/g

It does seem a bit random. I imagine that qualification is (at least partly) based on some actual site traffic data, either gathered from Analytics, the toolbar and/or search queries.

As a user I like it, but I'm not convinced that showing this for queries such as "Altavista" is appropriate. "Search altavista.com" doesn't really produce the results that I think most users would expect when they hit the button.

[edited by: tedster at 6:30 pm (utc) on Mar. 5, 2008]

Sitelinks are far worse at this point, because they don't just appear for brand names. example.com can get sitelinks for a "widgeting" search when there are innumerable other sites covering widgeting as well or better.

thanks

Nope, I can see it for a quite generic term, think "blue widgets". My site comes up first, will see if it increases traffic, will be quite easy to spot, just look for site: in the logs.

Did wikipedia ever have sitelinks?