Legal Research

Google Teleportation

By Simon Fodden

Google has quietly introduced a search feature it calls “teleportation.” They’d cottoned on to the fact that increasingly people don’t bother learning and using a site’s URL, but rather put the site’s name into Google and use the result at or near the top to get to their destination. But often people who do that don’t just want the front page of a site but need to find something on an inside page. So for some big-name sites Google has introduced a search box in the results that will let you search within that site. Here’s a graphic of that feature for Xerox:

As I said, it’s only for the biggies that this seems to work — Slaw, alas, not being one of those. The Google Official Blog says:

This feature will now occur when we detect a high probability that a user wants more refined search results within a specific site. Like the rest of our snippets, the sites that display the site search box are chosen algorithmically based on metrics that measure how useful the search box is to users.

Seems to me that blogs might be a special case. On the one hand, the new stuff appears on the front page and so the first step of flinging the blog name into Google might satisfy; on the other hand, a blog can be a large compendium of semi-organized information that, in the absence of a rational page structure, is perfectly suited to a “search within” box. I think Google should try teleportation for blogs to see if there’s any take-up.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on March 06, 2008 (boomark / email).