5 replies to this topic

[AbleReach]

Google has a brand new search.

In its current version, Google Accessible Search looks at a number of signals by examining the HTML markup found on a web page. It tends to favor pages that degrade gracefully–that is, pages with few visual distractions, and pages that are likely to render well with images turned off. Google Accessible Search is built on Google Co-op’s technology, which improves search results based on specialized interests.

Read more in The Cre8tive Flow.

[bwelford]

Good spot, Elizabeth. I'm sure this niche is pretty sizeable and Google would seem to have set the bar high for any competition. Perhaps Google is switching from 'Do No Evil' to 'Do Good'.

[dgeary9]

Well, just playing with it briefly, I noticed a few things:

1) It ditches the local yellow pages results at the top of local searches - odd, those would seem to be quite accessible??

2) It tends to pick up a site internal page more often - often these pages rank ahead of home pages.

3) A lot more .co.uk results - is the UK a leader in accessibility design, or are there design trends in the UK that just happen to be accessible?

4) The big shopping engines (shopping.com, bizrate.com, etc) seem to do well in the accessible searches. As a result, a search on a couple of electronic gadgets pulled up a bunch of shopping aggregator sites on the accessible search, and a lot more product review sites on standard search.

Interesting. What are other folks seeing?

[yannis]

Interesting. After visiting the link and despite having re-booted my computer all my google search results are shown in a much larger font! google must have left a cookie under my preferences! Anyone else saw experienced this?

Yannis

[lee.n3o]

I'm liking this new Google page... I rank #3 for the term 'SEO Bedford'... Coooooool ... hehehehehe.... And I only just started to push that term as well....

[AbleReach]

1) It ditches the local yellow pages results at the top of local searches - odd, those would seem to be quite accessible??

I think removing advertising is an accessibility feature. The paid results are gone, too.

Try searching for (map of city, state.)

2) It tends to pick up a site internal page more often - often these pages rank ahead of home pages.

Interesting. Do they have fewer links on the page, to a point? Are they more likely to portray a single-ish topic? Sometimes home pages of big commercial sites have a gazillion topic areas.

Hmmm... right now I'm not seeing ads on a www.google.com search for accessible, or accessible search.
A search for (accessible search) gives me this above the results, and still no advertising:
labs.google.com/accessible/
Similar pages

A search for (Google accessible search) gives me the same, but with this one contextual ad at the right:
Sponsored Links
Google Free web search
Easy to add to your site
Make users happy - get it now
www.google.com/searchcode.html