by SEO & Affiliate Consultant
M. Thomson
At Searchology 2009, Google announced its new search result functionality - Search Options. And one of its new search options, Google Wonder Wheel, lets users filter their results a little bit further by showing the initial search query along with an "octopus" style list of spin-off or related terms.M. Thomson
Searching for bigmouthmedia returns the following screenshot and related terms:
Where have we seen a Google product of similar nature? Yes, you guessed it, Google Social Graph API. Google's Social Graph API announced in February 2008 works in a very similar way to Wonder Wheel.
Let's compare their functionality and internal workings to understand the connections:
Social Graph API - makes use of microformats, XFN and FOAF to show the connection between social media profiles around the web. For example; if you have a blog, and you link to your Twitter profile, you would append a little tag (microformat) to the link to tell Google, or other search engines that this is one of your social profiles. You can then do the same with your friend's websites. Add them all up, and you make a social network.
Wonder Wheel - official workings unknown, initial speculation appears to indicate that it works on the same principle as Google's "searches related to:" functionality. To test this, try a non-personalised search for "football" in Google.co.uk - Wonder Wheel results and "searches related to:" are the same. Google "searches related to:" workings are also unknown, but again, speculation would incline a search evangelist to think that these related words are generated based on a) user query refinements b) search frequencies and c) Google's ability to cluster, refine and categorise search queries and websites.
Now that we have analysed, and looked under the hood of both of these Google features, bigmouthmedia think we may have spotted a trend, or connection between both, and the answer is relationships.
With Social Graph, the goal is to tell Google (via microformats) the physically relationship between two, or more webpages. This then builds a physical relationship.
Wonder Wheel appears to work in the same way, with the exception that it has to make assumptions via theories described in this article in order to determine the relationships between words and queries.
Don't forget, we have seen how Google has been building relationships between websites via the advanced search operator "related:" for years now.
Overall, it would appear that Google is one step away from being able to determine relationships between webpages more effectively... or it is?
"Roll Up" Microformats
For over a decade now, Google has been using algorithms to determine the order of search results for a query. Google's original PageRank patent application was designed to determine the relationships between webpages and then rank them accordingly.While this has been very effective, Google's algorithm and technology will never be able to compete with human intervention, which is still missing from search engines (personalised search doesn't count as it is purely final user decision making). Could this missing human input come in the form of microformats?
Bigmouthmedia have predicated for a while now that microformats will begin to play an ever more important role in our search lives. Of course no-one outside of Google fully knows what their plans are but with a combination of HTML 5 and microformats, expect to see more changes in the way Google and other search engines such as Yahoo! use this additional data to their and their users gain.
