Finally Google becomes a website with Wonder wheel

[AjiNIMC]

I am little excited about wonder wheel as this is solving a big concern with a search engine (Navigation and refined queries). (I was working on this for individual site and have been proven to really helpful, hoping that it will be rolled out for CSE as well). When you search for a topic, you are getting a list of pages with the same content and you are forced to search again and again to refine your queries but here the refinement in query is not incremental. Wonder wheel can make the query refinement incremental and navigational.

Google was a search engine
Google was previously a search engine where you could search a topic and get 1000s of websites. Only one level of navigation possible.

Google then added another dimension - Refinements
Refinements was like adding links to the categories to define the navigation. This might have helped people navigate deeper into the real topics before looking at the results. It added a navigation aspect in a search engine. But it did not keep a track of your navigation (No BREADCRUMBS)

Circular navigation - Wonder wheel
None of us have faced such a difficult navigation problem as we had only few 1000s of pages but Google has billions of pages. Thus they had to invent multi dimension (circular) navigation. Now people can follow the breadcrumbs to come back to where they started the search using the connecting line and use the other nodes to navigate further.

How wonder wheel is helpful

• I searched for "mortgage", it showed me "how much mortgage can i afford","first time home buyer" .... Since I am first time home buyer, I clicked on it.
  
• It gave me some more options like "first time home buyer no down payment", "first time home buyer with bad credit" ... so I can click on it and move further down.
  

The biggest thing about wonder wheel is that so far in my search refinement, I haven't even looked at the results. (So traffic to refined keywords, WOW)

Wonder wheel can be money wheel for Google
If ever Google rolls out the wonder wheel interface then I am sure they will try to push the ads on the top of wonder wheel and rest of the result will follow on the right. CTRs will just jumpppppppppppppppp.

Expecting .. then only it Wonder will become really useful
I can expect 2 addition to this wonder wheel

1. A search box just below the top level wonder wheel (the last node of navigation), (for the above example) where, if I search for lender it will actually mean .... mortgage/first time home buyer/first time home buyer no down payment/lender. (So Google should show the pages that offers "mortgage lender information for first time home buyer with no down payment"(WOW this will be so sexy of a search engine)
   
2. Rotating wheel: As of now we only see 8 nodes but if we can make it rotating then we will be able to navigate to further nodes and refine our navigation far better.
   
3. Not expecting from Google is "Commercial and informational options" as they will like commercial guys to buy ads :)
   

I am sure that this is just a beginning of search refinements, we gonna see more refinements. Already I am using:

1. Date refinements (for technical queries mainly as you will like to see the latest modules available, example "Google API for adwords" in last week and then last month to see latest happening with the topic)
   
2. Videos, forums, recommendations/opinions etc (Now one should focus on Videos, forums and opinions very very seriously)
   

Regards,
Aji Issac

[tedster]

Time will tell if this test is successful, I guess. While you can access it (see this thread for details [webmasterworld.com]), it might be a good way to get ideas for how to expand your own content into related areas.

[thinker]

This would be very helpful for long-tail content developers? Unless ofcourse the high ranked sites cover all of the search refinements...

[Gmorgan]

Looks like it's live. I just saw "Web > Options" under the Google search box and when you open it one of the options is to play around with the Wonder Wheel.

There's too much change happening at Google right now. It's all making my head hurt.

[netchicken1]

Its great!
Fun to use and easy to go where you want

[AjiNIMC]

Looks like it is live now for me as well.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

It looks cool and might improve traffic for the long tail...

[Wlauzon]

Too early yet to see any traffic changes from the weblogs or analytics, but will be keeping a close eye on it to see what happens.

I see one immediate affect it might have - the ability to sort by age. That means there will be much more incentive to keep pages fresh and updated.

This apparently just went live today to the public?

[edited by: Wlauzon at 5:10 am (utc) on May 13, 2009]

[AnkitMaheshwari]

Sometimes, the wonder wheel shows exactly the same queries as it shows in "Searches related to" just after the search results, while at times they are completely different.

[LostOne]

Nice option. Found something I've been looking for buried in a Scientific American Journal from 1850.

no no no...I found it on the "timeline option." Never been there before.