Understanding Search Engine Results

In the search marketing field, the pages the engines return to fulfill a query are referred to as search engine results pages (SERPs). Each engine returns results in a slightly different format and will include vertical search results (specific content targeted to a query based on certain triggers in the query, which we’ll  illustrate shortly).

Understanding the Layout of Search Results Pages

Each unique section represents a snippet of information provided by the engines. Here are the definitions of what each piece is meant to provide:

Vertical navigation

Each engine offers the option to search different verticals, such as images, news, video, or maps. Following these links will result in a query with a more limited index. for example, you might be able to see news items about stuffed animals or videos featuring stuffed animals.

Horizontal navigation

The search engines also offer other types of navigation elements. For example, in below figure you can see that Google offers the option to limit the date range of the content returned in the search results.

Search query box

All of the engines show the query you’ve performed and allow you to edit that query or enter a new query from the search results page. Next to the search query box, the engines also offer links to the advanced search page, the features of which we’ll discuss later in the book.

Results information

This section provides a small amount of meta information about the results that you’re viewing, including an estimate of the number of pages relevant to that particular query (these numbers can be, and frequently are, wildly inaccurate and should be used only as a rough comparative measure).

PPC (a.k.a. paid search) advertising

Companies purchase text ads from either Google AdWords or Microsoft adCenter. The results are ordered by a variety of factors, including relevance (for which click-through rate, use of searched keywords in the ad, and relevance of the landing page are factors in Google) and bid amount (the ads require a maximum bid, which is then compared against other advertisers’ bids).

Natural/organic/algorithmic results

These results are pulled from the search engines’ primary indexes of the Web and ranked in order of relevance and popularity according to their complex algorithms. This area of the results is the primary focus of this section of the book.

Query refinement suggestions

Query refinements are offered by Google, Bing, and Yahoo!. The goal of these links is to let users search with a more specific and possibly more relevant query that will satisfy their intent. In March 2009, Google enhanced the refinements by implementing Orion Technology, based on technology Google acquired in 2006. The goal of this enhancement is to provide a wider array of refinement choices. For example, a search on principles of physics may display refinements for the Big Bang, angular momentum, quantum physics, and special relativity.

Shopping search results

All three search engines do this as well. Shopping results incorporate offers from merchants into the results so that searchers that are looking to buy something can do so quite easily.

Figure  shows the SERPs in Google for the query stuffed animals.

The various sections outlined in the Google search results are as follows:

1. Horizontal navigation (see top left)

2. Search query box

3. Results information

4. PPC advertising

5. Vertical navigation

6. Query refinement suggestions

7. Natural/organic/algorithmic results

Even though Yahoo! no longer does its own crawl of the Web or provides its own search results

information (it sources them from Bing), it does format the output uniquely. Figure shows

Yahoo!’s results for the same query.

The sections in the Yahoo! results are as follows:

1. Horizontal navigation

2. Search query box

3. Results information

4. Query refinement suggestions

5. Vertical navigation

6. PPC advertising

7. Natural/organic/algorithmic results

Figure shows the layout of the results from Microsoft’s Bing for the query stuffed animals.

The sections in Bing’s search results are as follows:

1. Horizontal navigation

2. Search query box

3. Results information

4. Query refinement suggestions

5. Vertical navigation

6. PPC advertising

7. Natural/organic/algorithmic results

8. Shopping search results

Be aware that the SERPs are always changing as the engines test new formats and layouts.

Thus, the images in Figure 1 through Figure 3 may be accurate for only a few weeks or

months, until Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft shift to new formats.