Understanding Google My Business & Local Search
Super Bowl Search Result – A Turkish Bazaar of Ambiguity AND Google’s Intentions
Given my love of professional sports, at least once a year I post a sports oriented post … of sorts. It was recently noted that Google was now including a faceted interface on mobile recipes to allow a user to select a specific type of recipe.
In honor of the Super Bowl I searched for chicken wings on my iPhone and got this Turkish Grand Bazaar (bizarre?) search result. It includes just about every new & old search result possible…. all on one page. It has more facets, amps, carousels, universal search results, articles, knowledge graphs and discover more places than one sports fan can take in.
Positions 1,2*,3,5,7, 10, 11, 15, 16, 17 (depending on what you count) take you to additional Google results or Google hosted content. Yelp got positions 4 and 6 while part of 2, 8,9, 12-14 also went off site.
A count of the links shows that 37 went elsewhere on Google. In addition there were 7 carousels which could be swept left for more Google results. 1 link allowed you to share a Google result on other services. 13 of the links, most without photos, went off site to another website. And this count does not include the any left to right scrolling that takes place in the carousels which would add additional clicks for Google.
I am sure that if you analyzed this result on a % of space allocated basis the bias towards Google hosted results would be similar or even greater.
This result certainly falls squarely into the category of turkish bizarre. Maybe Google does in fact understand my ambiguity vis a vis the Super Bowl and chicken wings?
Regardless these search results send the very clear signal that Google “owns” the mobile organic results. The opportunities in these sorts of results are diminishing unless of course you are Google.
*2 – I counted the faceting as a separate search result (#1) and the carousel at position 2 could take a user off site or back to Google depending on their choice.
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Comments
3 Comments
Who played, Mike? Who won the game? Which numerical Super Bowl was it? Who was the MVP? Who made amazing plays?
How were the chicken wings? What kind of sauce did you use? What did you have besides Chicken Wings? What were you drinking?
Should the Patriots roast in hell? BTW: who are the Patriots?
Now a serious comment: More commentary on the “multiple carousel” element of the serp you showed:
https://www.distilled.net/resources/Google-expanding-carousel-for-best-keywords/
One element of the observation was that the carousels might function to decrease traffic to directory type sites or sites with listings of a variety of choices. Hmmmm….google’s highway, google telling the other websites…that you ain’t getting much more traffic from OUR search engine.
Interesting.
Wow, there is a lot going on there in the search results. There is a lot of variety. Did the the results change your behavior? Did you use any of those recipes or did having Dominos in the local 3-pack cause you to order wings for delivery. (The 3 pack was truly a snack pak in this case, lol.) Does Dominos even have chicken wings? I just searched that and it does.
A few of the results in your search, the Hooters one and the curry chicken wings recipe and some others have AMP written by them. When did that start happening? Omg. This is the first time I’ve noticed that. I’m working way too hard these days.
When I search for “chicken wings,” here in Calgary, I get a huge ad words ad for a recipe for chicken wings using Hellman’s mayonnaise, then the local 3-pack of restaurants serving chicken wings, six listings with recipes (some with a description only, some with photos, some with photos, ratings, cook times, and calories, a couple with AMP by them. Then I get a wikipedia listing on Buffalo wings, then more recipes, then two Yelp listings (Best 10 Chicken Wings in Calgary, and then a carousel.
What is interesting is that Google is inferring that my search “chicken wings” is informational rather than transactional in nature. I mean they’re giving me way more recipes than restaurants. If I search “chicken wings Calgary” I get all restaurants and “directories or guides” of restaurants…there’s a directory called wingsnbeer.com and Foursquare and Yelp of course.
Thanks, Mike, your post was fun and very interesting.
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