Google Suggest – How Can We Use It?
August 26th, 2008 § Leave a Comment
Google are soon making their quirky Suggest feature live. Much like your Firefox toolbar, it offers search suggestions to help you find new content on the web. The cool thing is that you get a competition figure (i.e. number of results):
The question however is how to use this data. Should I start targeting ‘piggy bank’ and ‘piggymoo’? After all, Google are suggesting ‘piggymoo’ so a lot of people must search for it, right? Should I disard ‘piggy bank’ because there’s so much competition?
It’s been speculated that Google’s suggestions direct you to Ad-filled pages, essentially increasing your chances of clicking on an Advert and making Google money. If that’s the case, why don’t Google go a step further and try and keep users on the Google network? (They could!)
If Google are that cynical this information is pretty useless. It doesn’t reflect what people search for but what Google want people to search for. On the other hand, if it really comes straight from Google’s database it’s a goldmine of information. I think some serious testing is in order to find Suggest’s true potential – let’s hope I find the time!