New twist in serps for #5, 6, 7

[dibbern2]

Pardon me in advance if this has already been discussed, but I've just seen a feature in a serps page that seems new, and raise some questions.

I was looking for state related info on medicare and searched for *utah medicare*. The first serps page showed about 4 listings in the normal way. THEN the page was divided by a blue horiz rule, and a bold subhead saying *See results for: utah medicaid* with 3 listings for utah medicaid sites. (The term utah medicaid in the serp listing was bolded, as though that was my search term, which it was not.)

THEN another blue rule, and a return to serps for the original search term -utah medicare.

Additional pages were seemd normal; no additional terms, no sections offset by blue horiz rules.

Now it's obvious that medicare and medicaid are closely related terms, so I can guess a bit about the logic behind this page. But it seems to me that the ramifications, if this becomes the standard, are pretty big. For starters, there's the fact that listings which would have appeared on the first page of a 10-listing-page got bumped due to lack of real estate. Then there's the question of what and how these suggested related topics will be chosen.

Any ideas?

[tedster]

I've been seeing this kind of SERP for many months when a search term is either semantically ambiguous or commonly used to mean something that is spelled differently.

In the end, Google is working to give searchers information they are looking for, and that's what this kind of effort is all about. In regards to the "bumped" results that end up on page 2, well Google is not running an SEO contest. No doubt Google measures whether the "inserted" results are getting better end-user response than using #11, 12 and 13 would have generated.

[edited by: tedster at 12:40 am (utc) on Aug. 10, 2006]

[dibbern2]

Thanks, Tedster, for the explanation. I guess I just didn't hit the right search terms before today. Sounds like its not much of an issue.