MovableBlog: Questions About Google's "Similar pages" Links
March 22, 2005
It's probably a safe bet that most people reading my weblog(s) are either bloggers themselves or at the very least, read a few weblogs. It's probably an even safer bet that you're familiar with Google. Those who are either (again, most likely both), I have two questions:
- have you ever, when you scan your referrer log, seen a referrer from Google that contained "related:" in the query string?
- how often do you as a Google user click the "Similar pages" link after typing in a search?
I ask because in my 4+ years of blogging, I've never, not once, seen someone come through a 'related link' referrer. Now, I'm willing to concede that I'm blocking one or two out of my memory, but none ever stood out for me to remember clearly. Also, I can count on one hand the amount of times I've clicked "Similar pages" and actually went to a site based on the results. This is out of thousands of searches over the same stretch I knew about weblogs and have been blogging. I've seen absolutely nobody talk about this 'feature' in the last 2 years, give or take.
Google doesn't even seem to serve ads on those results. Are those links so under-clicked that Google doesn't even bother? And if so, why have those links in the first place? Wouldn't it be more compelling—when and after Google buys a respectable weblog search engine, or develops their own, of course—to have a link to the people currently talking about that page?
Comments
Well, I have to admit my own blog is barely two weeks old, but there are no google "related:" results in my logs (there's not much of anything in my logs). As a user, I don't even notice that google has a "similar pages" link, and I use google several times every day. Apparently, it's one of those things I just don't notice, like banner ads.
The idea of "similar pages" on a google results page puzzles me, though. Since all the results for my search came from the same query string, shouldn't the "similar pages" be, for a large part anyway, the other pages that show up as results of my search?
Posted by: Tyler Karaszewski | March 22, 2005 02:14 AM
I use Google's "similar to" feature often, so I was curious about how often it turns up in my logs: 25 times in the preceding week out of a total of 1.8 million total requests.
Posted by: Rogers Cadenhead | March 22, 2005 07:06 AM
My Blog is working on 5 years now and I've NEVER gotten a link from Google "related:".
I must admit that I check which sites are related to mine once in a while and I do even click on some of them, so I'm sure some people are getting the referrers. :)
Posted by: timsamoff | March 22, 2005 08:01 AM