Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I was just reading the thread on Site links here
[webmasterworld.com...]
and started to play around with the example Marcia was using ie Dodge.
I entered the search [~Dodge +modelname] the model name being a minivan and was very surprised to see other manufacturers names and the names of their equaly well known minivan brands highlighted in SERPS.
Have I had my head in the sand or has this just started?
Cheers
Sid
Sid - I'd not noticed this before, but it's a strong illustration of how far Google's synonym lexicon has been developed.
On the [~dodge +caravan] search you suggested, I'm frankly astonished to see "Honda Odyssey" and "Toyota Sienna", eg, appearing in the serps. We're talking about several levels of co-occurrence and categorization here.
I think this could be applied to a lot of what we're seeing on Google these days, not just in Sitelink choices, but also in Universal Search classifications and perhaps in some rerankings now in progress.
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 10:29 pm (utc) on Mar. 18, 2008]
It's not new, but it has been growing in some strange and interesting ways. I have one client who owns three related and trademarked brands. The tilde search brings up two of them, but not the third. I haven't quite figured that one out.
Also, I recently tried a tilde search for another company's brand and same as you did, I saw the competition's brandname come up in bold. So it's clear that the tilde operator is not exactly a "synonym" search but more like a "closely related" operator. With general words, that often means synonyms -- but it is much better understood as the most prominent of all the co-occurrence terms.
I suppose that this is OK if they get it right. But what if someone elses US brand name is your UK generic for something entirely different and this leads to Google de-ranking you. There is no mechanism for telling Google that she got it wrong.
I agree with Robert and from my own situation I can see signs that what we are seeing here is extended to normal natural searches not just tilde searches.
Folks in the UK may remember the Two Ronnies sketches where one of the characters starts a sentence but can't quite get the last word out and the other character makes a series of incorrect guesses. I wonder if that was the model for Google's new algorithmic direction.
Cheers
Sid
