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Google Book Search Results Defy Clustering, Quantity Precedents

September 10, 2007

Sean pointed this out to me early this morning. While we've known that Google has rolled out Book Search results in its main results column, some of the things Sean is seeing seem a bit out of whack with G's traditional clustering and placement precedents.

For example, here's the first page of results for [monopoles]. When I run the query, I don't see these results, but Sean does, along with a few other people that Sean has (mono)polled around the country:

Note how the results are unclustered. In other words, results from a specific subdomain typically get grouped together on the SERP for the sake of convenience, user experience, or ... well, for some reason, anyway. The results pulled from the books.google.com subdomain seem immune from the clustering behavior. And when results appear in the "regular 10" (as opposed to one-box) results, any given group of 10 results typically shows only two results from a given subdomain. This SERP shows three.

This is hardly the clustered behavior that some bloggers like Seth Godin have noticed. The examples he gives in that post are neatly organized at the top of the SERP in a one-box-style format.

If you move to the second page of SERPs (results 11-20) you'll see even more instances. In the case of [monopoles], Google Book Search holds six positions in the 11-20 group:

So for at least this query (and several others he's shown me today), Google Book Search has nearly half the top organic positions. That's hard to beat.

see all posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at September 10, 2007 01:43 PM
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