Google’s new Easy-To-Read algo with Accessible Search

SES San Jose 2006 »

Google’s new Easy-To-Read algo with Accessible Search

July 21st, 2006 — | What say you?

Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

Google introduced a new, early-stage experiment for finding sites that are easy to read… finally it’s official that they incorporate the web-design into the search algos…

Last year google search engineers already explained that they use "VIPS technology":http://www.marketingfan.com/a/search-engines/google-engineers-on-link-value-vips-flash-duplicate-content-and-crawler-budget.php to analyze sites and it’s obviously used to value links based on their location (you want to get "links in content":http://www.presellpageman.com , do you?)

The Google Accessible Search adds a small twist to how search results are returned. the most relevant results are sorted based on the simplicity of their page layouts.

So today, when users search from the Accessible search "site":http://labs.google.com/accessible, they’ll receive results that are prioritized based on their usability. WOW… did you read THAT? search results based on usability… that’s cool!

They look at a number of "usability signals" by examining the HTML markup found on a web page.

It favors

pages with few visual distractions
pages that are likely to render well with images turned off

Interesting to read that Google Accessible Search is built on "Google Co-op’s technology":http://www.marketingfan.com/a/communities/google-coop-how-to-add-your-links-to-the-google-premium-spots.php that I just released that "realtime RSS converter":http://www.marketingfan.com/a/rss-marketing/realtime-rss-to-google-coop-converter.php for…

So this is a great new feature – and a LOT to rethink when doing search engine optimization. Takes this idea vice-versa you can think of a search result penalty if your site is designed poorly or overloaded and cluttered… way time to get some really cool web-designers, eh?

and, as you can see from the links to the Google post, it already got a lot buzz