Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By David Aronchick
But the thing feature I’m most impressed with, that never fails to make my job searching easier, is the “Did you mean?” suggestion. An article on Search Engine Journal pointed out the fact that ~80% of search traffic comes from long tail keywords. The fact is that the new search experience for users is to execute a search, not find what you’re looking for, and then add another term or two to the findings to narrow everything down. Which makes complete sense – you wouldn’t walk up to a librarian and say “Meyer” and expect to get the exact passage you’re looking for in New Moon (if you’re into that sort of thing).
The beautiful part about Google is not just that they figured this out early, but they let people do the work for them. Someone sat there looking through all the search query logs and said, “Hey, did you notice that 85% of people who search for ‘Italian Vacation’ then search for ‘Italia Vacation’ right afterwards?” By doing nothing more than presenting the NEXT most common thing that people search for, they saved all that time and energy wasted by users trying to figure out what the search engine now thought they were Italian. Three simple words and a link, and, boom, millions of end user hours saved.
Source: http://www.hydranterouge.com/blog/?p=523
Even better is that the feature extends well beyond misspelling, without a single code change. Let’s take that search for “Meyer” previously. At first glance, it could mean anything – your fourth grade teacher, a lemon, a producer of fine snow plow equipment – and the user must spend the time then specifying what they meant. But, by looking at what users are doing, at any given moment, and suggesting what lots and lots of other people are also doing right now, you save some large percentage of users the mental energy required to correct themselves. The rest of the folks can just ignore the “Did you mean” line, and correct themselves as they were going to do anyway. Boom – sixty for the price one!
Source: http://mix941.fm/pages/4093056.php
The end user awareness this shows about the product managers at Google is obvious. Watching what is popular and what people are doing is a nice way to profile your base, and understand the big features to work on. But going the extra distance, understand not just what they are doing, but what they want to do next, and offering it to them on a silver platter – that’s what it takes to be great.
