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Google Organic Search: Will the Rich Get Richer?

October 26, 2005

One of this week's Google buzz topics is the testing of a new airline reservation interface, which appears when a query phrase contains iterations of two major cities:

Similar results appear for the queries [los angeles new york] or [flight from los angeles to new york], so Google is allowing some latitude in the required syntax.

This is almost certainly a UI experiment on Google's part, and will probably disappear without any notice and head back to the shop for retooling. For now, however, a few characteristics stand out:

• The links (as shown in the screen shot) appear organic, not paid. So the big question for now is, how does Google decide which three (in this case) sites will be featured?
  
• The main link, titled "Flights from Los Angeles, CA to New York Kennedy, NY" links to the same page as the Expedia link directly below the date box. That actual title, however, does not come from that Expedia page. I suspect it is a title formula created by Google for this specific type of search result, since the same format appears in searches for different cities.
  
• The pre-loaded depart/return dates (two weeks out - in this case, 11/10-11/17) appear to be random as none of the three sites listed below the date boxes have presumed dates of departure and return on their home pages. The presumed duration of the trip is one week, regardless of whether both points are intra- or intercontinental.
  
• It probably goes without saying, but clicking from this SERP over to Expedia, Hotwire, or Orbitz forces a search for the specified airports on the specified dates. Programmatically, linking to a dynamic, as-yet-uncreated page is a notch or two more complicated than simply showing additional links for a top result in other searches (which we've written about before), such as the following:

Study after study shows the benefits of a first-place listing on the Google results page - even without interface enhancements like these. When you throw additional links or an intuitive industry-specific feature into the equation, the benefits are exponential. It's useless to label this phenomenon "good" or "bad" because depending on your current positioning, you already know which one it is.

All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at October 26, 2005 11:54 PM
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Posted by: yinka at November 10, 2007 04:11 PM

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