John Battelle's Searchblog

Good observation...
Google trying to be everywhere you turn (click).

They have been doing this for some time -- seemingly rolling it out and then making it disappear. I have seen similar for recipes and other Google base information. Hard to determine when/what/how it is triggered.

John, not to be obnoxious but you do live in a bit of a bubble these days. Google is no longer the hot topic that once were. With serious Wall Street problems, missing their quarter (badly) to the MSN/Yahoo tie-up, Google is no longer the draw it used to be. Their vulnerabilities are exposed, people are leaving is droves, they're missing their numbers and have yet to build that *new* revenue stream. They're still an incredible company but not worthy of the time people used to spend on them. Sorry.

It's like a Yahoo directory service, except you dig down with multiple search bars instead of categories. Still, it's other people's content at the end of the multiple searches, so I don't see how this is Google "owning" the second click.

I missed the point completely. Lately you posts have been abbreviated simple one liners with a link attached.
Clearly JB you are not into this anymore.

Chasing the big payday I can hardly blame you. As such however your blog has been relegated to the bottom of the my MyYahoo page.
You do remain a must read for when and IF you get your head back into this blog.

Mike -
You are right, for the most part (I do write analytical things from time to time!). FM is taking most of my time, and I have so many things I want to write about but cannot take the time to do the way I want to. I expect this to change soon.

Actually, I do not see this as Google wanting to own the second click. I see this as a contextually appropriate refinement of the first click. It's actually the sort of thing I think Google should do more of. They're attempting to do a better job at reading the user intent, and offering to the user a more powerful interface for refining that intent.

However, Google is doing one thing in this interface that works against them: The two advertisements at the top appear above the secondary search box, rather than below them.

This is problematic because by putting "click" possibilities (ads) above "query refinement" possibilities, Google is implicitly saying that it knows you could get much better results by refining your initial query (still part of the first click), but it is more interested in serving you ads, thereby moving you on to the second click and away from the query refinement.

I welcome this new contextual query refinement approach. I think Google is doing good by things like this. Again, however, this forward-thinking step is tainted by a continued non-independence and over-prioritization of ads.

More and more, the crap Google is coming up with is driving me to simply type Google search queries directly into the URL bar (which, if others were to follow, may actually bring information retrieval back to Earth [*]).

BTW: John, is this going to be a chapter in your upcoming book:

http://www.google.com/search?q=second-click&num=100

:D nmw

[*] in a recent edition of Danny Sullivan's "Daily Searchcast" he mentioned that he uses SEVERAL browsers (e.g. one that has "never logged in" to Google) -- taken to the extreme, this would mean that to protect privacy we ought to use a differently browser for every dubious website we might visit! LOL !!

ps / BTW:

I presume the "housing" search result only shows up for people inside the USA (?)

This is another looming problem casting dark shadows on Google: Google no longer returns reliable (verifiable) results -- in other words: if what you see is different than what I see, then it is no longer like looking something up in a telephone directory, a dictionary, an encyclopedia, etc. So this means that Google is now not only undermining the value of its product/service by returning ads instead of relevant results, it is also undermining the product/service by sometimes returning a windshield, sometimes returning a bug, sometimes returning a nail, sometimes returning a hammer, sometimes returning ... -- well, your guess is as good as mine! (*)

:D nmw

(*) one caveat: I DO expect that Google will continue to focus more and more on PAID results -- so I guess at some point in time, showing up on a Google SERP might be something that declares: "we are not good enough to show up on any RELIABLE search engine -- that's why we pay Google alot of money to advertise our product/service here"... -- and indeed, I have already noted that "miserable failure" already seems to return more articles about Google than it returns about George Bush! ;P

Well spotted. The Dutch Google doesn't has it yet, to be honest. I start to dislike all these extra functions.

There will come a time that you can choose, Google Classic or Google X. Some other searches at google.NL allready give suggestions or other searchresults (images directly, conversions etc.)

Most of the times not what I was searching for...