iEntry 10th Anniversary
RSS
Contact
 |
|
What About Google Co-op? 
By: Chris Richardson 2006-05-25 Google has been on a new feature launch tear here recently, which began at this year's Google Press Day. Of these tools, Google Trends is probably getting the most publicity and with good reason.
Google Trends is great tool and the information it provides can be educational, revealing and quite humorous. Search marketers and trend followers alike could probably lose themselves with all of the data Google's comparison tool makes available. But Google Trends is not the only new launch that has potential to be useful. The crew from Mountain View also introduced Google Co-op, an area that allows users to create topics and then associate specific types of searches with the areas of interest. Essentially, Google Co-op reminds me of a wiki-directory. However, instead of rounding up sites and sticking them into categories, you place them inside which ever topic label matches the best. Google explains a little further, "We encourage you to annotate useful and reliable webpages in [various topics] using the labels below." In WebProWorld, this very topic is being discussed, thanks to an in-depth post from moderator Jaan Kanellis, better known as incrediblehelp. Because of its quality, I'm going to "reprint" his post in its entirety. Feel free to share your comments with us. Google Co-op Confusion I am sure everyone has been having lots of fun with recent tools at Google. A tool like Trends is a cool one to mess around with, but another recent released at Google called Co-op is the one that SEO's should be really interested in. My first question when it was released was what the heck is it? Philipp Lenssen has a good explanation of what Google Co-Op is and how to implement lesson that everyone interested should check out. Some good excerpts: Quote: There are three different variants of how Co-op appears in the Google search results at the moment; search refinements on top of results, subscribed links on top of results, and labels below result snippets. Basically you will start to see "Refine results for "x keyword:" start to show up on the search results. This is sort of how cluster search engines work. The great thing about Google Co-op is we get to do the clustering! These "onebox" results at the top of the organic results are very accurate and should help end searchers find what they are looking for. Of course the down side of this is that it pushes our precious organic results down slightly further. Quote: Google on their Co-op homepage calls the people who are supposed to provide content for Co-op search results "contributors." I suppose that's meant to be somewhere between users and developers; nothing casual, but no rocket science either. (To get the full Co-op spectrum to work, you need to know about the annotation system, how to create the XMLs, how to use regular expressions to match URLs, and how to distinguish "topics", "contexts", "labels", "annotations" and "facets".) I have yet to test this myself and will be over the next few weeks. Remember the bottom line of Google doing this is get more end searchers to be signed into their Google personal home page when conducting a search on Google which will benefit Google and hopefully the Google SERPs in the long run. end of post As you can see, Jaan's curiosity has compelled him to try out Google's "other" new toy. But what about you? What do you think the potential of Google Co-op is? How much of an impact on the SERPs do you think it can and will have? One of our regular posters isn't as high on the cooperative service and issues an interesting warning: Jabber_uk - Google getting desperate? Trying the "let the people choose" approach? It doesn't work for me and worries me slightly (black hatters out there could have a field day!) If things like Google Co-op and personalized search can actually influence the SERPs, then perhaps he has a point. Much like the hacker universe, the goal of the black-hat SEO is to be prepared when something new like this comes along. Hopefully, Google is as well. About the Author: Chris is a staff writer for iEntry, focusing on the search industry. |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| SearchNewz
is an iEntry, Inc. ® publication
©
$line) {
echo $line ;
}
?>
All Rights Reserved. Newsletter Archive - Privacy Policy - Legal - Sitemap - Contact Us - RSS Feeds - Newsletter Signup |
