I’ve been carrying around this post for quite a while, waiting to have time to give it the attention it fully deserves. The catalyst for writing it now was an article on the New York Times about how Google wants to become your “answer engine.”

(I can’t seem to find the article that I read now, but it probably doesn’t matter since it’s been a few days and it’s probably behind the paywall now anyway.)

The jist of the article is that Google wants to refine their search to the point that a user can type in their idea of what they want, and Google can anticipate their actual need.

The most simplistic example of this is asking Google to convert between units of measure. Typing “30 dollars to pounds” will get you the current exchange rate. The next step is that when you type just “dollars to pounds” Google can anticipate that you are seeking a conversion rate (even though you didn’t use the keyword “conversion rate”) and give it to you.

You used to have to actually go to a website for this information...

The final step is that they give you the conversion right in the search suggestions, so you don’t even need to finish submitting a query.

You used to have to finish typing in order to get this information.

Google wants to apply this logic to everything they can. Searching for “flight time from … to …”? They can anticipate that you might be looking for a flight and serve you a table of the upcoming flights to purchase.

So what’s the problem? The problem is the 99% rule. Just because something works 99% of the time, doesn’t mean it turns out just fine that other 1% of the time. Google is not infallible.

And my favorite (current) example of this searching for vegan recipes online. I tried out vegan-ism earlier this year for three months. I had to relearn how to cook quite a few things, and searching Google for recipes became a challenge.

In Google’s opinion “vegan” and “vegetarian” are interchangeable words. But while they may be similar, take the search query “vegan lasagna recipe“. There are fundamental differences between a vegan lasagna and a vegetarian lasagna (i.e. cheese and possibly cream).

Vegan = Vegetarian. It does if you're Google and you're scrambling to find relevant results.

But looking at the Google results, it’s pretty clear how Google views this query. Notice how “vegetarian” is bolded in several of the results? That indicates that the results matches your query!

(Something not shown in the image is that 4 out of 5 of the AdWords ads are vegan-only. It seems that Google’s advertisers are doing a better job of segmenting traffic than the search engine itself.)

But a site with a title like “Vegetarian Lasagnas – The Veggie Table – Vegetarian Recipes and Info” has nothing to do with veganism. In this case, the “answer” Google provides is nothing but a waste of time and potentially frustrating, especially when the user has been conditioned to see bolded results as “the answer” to their query.

The real issue is that Google knows that it doesn’t have enough “quality” results for “vegan lasagna” so they are bending the meaning of words to appear more relevant. In this case, a vegan might notice that the recipe calls for cheese before they cook the dish and dig in.

But how long before Google decides that “tesla roadster” is just another word for “lotus elise” and shows me where to put the gas in my car when I search “tesla roadster gas cap” (if you think that example is extreme then you should meet some of the people I know).

Can you tell the difference? If your query doesn't have enough results then Google might not choose to.

What about if Google decides that “Libertarian” means the same as “Republican”? Anyone’s blood boiling yet?

Tags: conversion rate, current exchange rate, dollars to pounds, google, new york times, time doesn, vegan recipes

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 7th, 2010 at 12:12 pm and is filed under The Untouchable Playbook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.