Jeremy Chatfield (via Got Ads) has a great post up showing how Google’s using past query behavior to influence current AdWords results. It looks like Google’s considering consecutive searches part of one session, to try and narrow in on what you really want, with strange results: a search for “Brazil tax credits” is clearly munged with a search for “US vacation”, producing a top AdWords result for a “Brazilian vacation.” Jeremy argues that this bleedover destroys the intent of both – which it clearly does, in this example.
I don’t believe this is an attempt to simply get more revenue for Google – although it might have this result. Instead, I think Google’s trying to optimize for poor searchers, assuming that it’ll take people several tries to narrow in on what they want, and the algorithm isn’t good enough yet. Do the searches for ‘vacation’, ‘russia’, and ‘vacation’ back-to-back. In this case, the AdWords for the second ‘vacation’ are clearly influenced by the immediately previous ‘russia’, and that’s probably a good thing.
I wonder how long it’ll be before Google has a variable at the user level that tells it exactly how sophisticated a searcher someone is. Heh – maybe they’ll start using a user’s search sophistication to predict the intelligence of the end user, and tailor the results accordingly. If it takes you five searches to convey that you want to travel to St. Petersburg by train, you’re going to get some web pages with some very short words.
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Hi Greg,
Good hypothesis, except that *organic* results are static for the search history. See the examples in my article – identical organic results. If Google was trying to improve search results, they’d mess with organic? I mean, they change organic results all the time… That’s where personal search was introduced.
Very good point.
Perhaps search isn’t talking to ads and vice versa? As an employee at a mammoth Internet company I know cross-department cooperation is always brutal.
Or perhaps you’re right, and this is just a revenue grab.
Hi Greg – you may be right, and its’ a left-hand/right-hand thing. However, monetisation is a function of the whole page. If Google is so stupid as to let the paid search crew drop the cumulative relevance of the page, they deserve every nasty thing that happens. They haven’t been that stupid in the past… My guess, as you’ve seen, is that this is intended to shift the Nash Equilibrium by increasing the size of the market and thereby driving up prices. The algorithm *badly* needs tuning, though. Thanks for your insights