Learn SEO Directly from the Search Engines
Some patents and some white papers focus upon search queries, and how a search engine might respond to what a searcher might be looking for, and help to fulfill the informational and situational needs they might have.
It is often tempting to think of search queries in terms of the intent behind them, whether they are informational, transactional or navigational. I recommend that people read the paper A Taxonomy of Web Search by Andrei Broder (who is now at Google) to learn more about the intents behind Search Queries.
With the Web becoming more Semantic and being more about finding entities, it’s possible that looking at search queries to see if they trigger the appearance of an answer box or a featured snippet will become more common.
How Google May Use Synonym Substitutions to Rewrite Queries A couple of months ago, I wrote about a Google patent that involved rewriting queries, titled Investigating Google RankBrain and Query Term Substitutions. There’s likely a lot more to how Google’s RankBrain approach works, but I came across a patent that seems related to the patent … Read more
Trigger Queries are Queries that return specific responses from a search engine, such as specific rich results depending upon the trigger. Recently I wrote about Google’s Enriched Results Patent, where Google looked at query terms searched for, and for some of them, the search engine returned special “enriched” search results that showed off things such … Read more
At Google’s 15th anniversary celebration last summer, shortly after Hummingbird was introduced, Tamar Yehoshua, Google VP of Search, showed us conversational search at Google by first demonstrating a query asking for “pictures of the Eiffel Tower,” and then following up with the query “How tall is It?” In that second query, Google had to not … Read more
I’ve been exploring some of the different search results that we see at Google, including things such as rich snippets and question-answering results, and came across a couple of patent filings from Google that describe something called “Enriched Results.” You’ve seen enriched results before. As the first of the patent filings tells us, these results … Read more
When I’m looking for something at a search engine, I will often start with a particular query, and then depending upon the kinds of results I see, I often change the query terms I use. It appears that Google has been paying attention to this kind of search behavior from people who search like me. … Read more