search within SERPs

[Gurtie]

no idea what the proper name for this is, it probably has a stupid one, but I'm talking about the search box which appears below sitelinks for some seaches - in the UK 'pricerunner' tends to kick it off.

There's an official Google explanation and screenshot from waaaay back here http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/search-within-site-tale-of.html where it's presented as a solution to searchers 'teleporting' and then having to search again.  I tend to cynically say that it appears for sites which directly compete with google (price comparison affiliates, information providers), rather than ones which indirectly compete such as amazon and ebay.

Has anyone ever worked this thing out though? Why pricerunner and not kelkoo? What kicks it off?

More importantly I guess, what does it do to traffic (down?) and conversion rate? (up, perhaps?)

[Gurtie]

yeah, and WHSmith, but not blackwells, or ikea, or John Lewis. Is there really that much more propensity to search than browse on some of them than others?

[TallTroll]

>> Has anyone ever worked this thing out though? Why pricerunner and not kelkoo? What kicks it off?

I can't prove it definitively, but it seems to trigger for sites where a root domain has a crushing lead for a given search term.  To take your example, Pricerunner gets it because the next most relevant root domain is Wikipedia - powerful, but not going to have the term specific power that the *actual* PR domain will clearly have. Now look at the Kelkoo results - Kelkoo.co.uk, and a few of its' subdomains at the top, then you get into kelkoo.com. The .com will *also* have pretty strong relevancy for "kelkoo", so neither can achieve the crushing dominance needed to trigger the behaviour.

Compare and contrast "the guardian", "the times" and "new york times". The Grauniad gets the search box - nothing else out there is sufficiently relevant. The Times doesn't - Time magazine beats them to it for the single word "times", so their dominance is not overwhelming. But the NYT *is* dominant for the phrase "new york times", and gets it's search box.

Also note, I don't recall ever seeing an example of a site getting the search box, but not SiteLinks. SiteLinks is a reward for high relevancy compared to your competition, search box seems to be the Platinum Level trophy. As elegant as all that is, if anyone else has a better explanation, especially if it's evidence backed, I'd be more than willing to revise that opinion.

[Gurtie]

check wikipedia right now search but no sitelinks.

Today is the first time I recall seeing it though.

[TallTroll]

Nice try, but it doesn't wash. Find me a link on that page that could qualify as a SiteLink... Plenty of links to other subdomain roots, only a handful to URLs within the actual root domain, and they are all, without exception, marked as foreign language. I'm not sure, but I think Sitelinks is active, but null. Again, I can't prove that definitively.

Also, you're using Wikipedia as part of an argument? That feels too close to Godwins Law for me to possibly accept it. Maybe I'll write a Wikipedia page about it 

[Gurtie]

wikipedia is an awesome way to win an argument. Especially if you take the screengrab between your edit and it being rolled back.

that aside, your theory makes sense, which means in order to get the search box you would need at minimum, sitelinks in a search and a high volume of clarification searches[?] thats the official line but I'm not sure I entirely buy that. Either a significant volume of click throughs full stop, or a significant number of searches on your own site (as phoned home to Google).

[TallTroll]

I don't really buy the official line either, I'm not sure it's got anything to do with "more refined results". UEFA gets the behavior, FIFA doesn't. The Guardian and Telegraph get it, the Times doesn't. Channel 4 and Channel 5 get it, BBC, and ITV don't. Only the "overpowering relevance for [term]" explanation seems to fit to me.

[TallTroll]

Yes and no. It's not consistent within verticals, ie C4 / C5 do it, BBC / ITV don't. Npower do, Eon don't. NASA get it - no ads whatsoever on that, not even eBay / Ask etc on the initial search for "nasa", a handful for some terms like "Hubble telescope", "seti", "telescope" (Argos on that, at least it's finally something commercial), "shuttle", but nothing G are going ot get excited about.

It is really difficult to get hard info, because you can't see the relative scoring that leads to why a given result is where it is, but if you look at the results under a search box, it's rarely a secondary domain for the company, often a Wikipedia page, or similar. Where there isn't a .com / .co.uk / other TLD conflict you see a search box more often, but not always. My theory fits the facts I've seen, but it's far from the only posible one