Google recently confirmed that they have made a change to their interface. For certain keywords they will show 3 related results inserted into the main results. For example, here’s what you see when you search for tokenize.

There have been reports of this for quite some time, so Google have obviously done a reasonable amount of testing with this before they decided to roll it out to everyone. However, I don’t like it. I find them intrusive and the times I have seen them appear I was frustrated – I wanted to see results for the term I typed in – not for what Google thought I wanted to see.

I think something like this can significantly enhance the user experience but it needs to be less intrusive. Most other search engines chose to show related searches but few of them have got it exactly right. I like Yahoo’s interface where they show related searches below the search box.

This is nice and simple – but suffers from the problem that all the related search terms contain the word insulin, graphically demonstrated if you see all the related searches, e.g for insulin:

Ask have almost got it right – but chose to complicate their interface by grouping the related searches that expand or narrow your search or are related names. This is cool from a geeks perspective but I don’t think people care whether they’re expanding or narrowing their search. If a related search term that expands your search is more useful then it should be shown at the top of the list.

AOL used to use a similar concept – of clustering – from Vivisimo but when I looked just now I didn’t see it. They did show some related terms – but it searched only AOL results. MSN doesn’t offer anything like this.

There are some, enlightened smaller search engines who have got it right IMHO. For example search.com and mamma.com show related terms on the right hand side of the results. You just click them to fire off another search It’s simple, non-intrusive and really useful.

Of course, I am biased because we provide the related searches for those enlightened search engines . But I am truthfully less than impressed with Google’s effort.

One of SLI’s tactics to provide a better search is very simple: measure quality of the search, try to improve it, then see if the metrics have improved. In a previous posting I discussed some of our other measures of search relevance. This week we’re unveiling another way of measuring search quality: our site search survey. What’s more we’re making it available free for anyone to use.

This tool allows you to put a question on your site search page asking your visitors if they found the results useful or not. They simply click Yes or No and we record the responses and make them available to you via online reports. We also provide visitors the opportunity to add feedback.

Once you have this tool on your site you have a measure of the quality of your site search which we track for you. It’s particularly useful to look at the keywords people are using when they complain and the comments they give. This allows you to understand the types of problems people are having and highlights areas that you should be improving. You can then try improving your site search and see if it has an impact on the number of complaints.

The idea for this tool was inspired by one of our customers (Veritas, I think). We were trying to put together a case study around why they chose our search. We were looking for some hard ROI numbers. But these can be hard to get and often the effort that goes into getting the numbers isn’t justified. They said the main reason they chose to keep using us after their trial was because their complaints about search stopped once they put our search up.

Our customer, Eastwood, used the feedback tool on their old search and then on their new search and saw a dramatic reduction in the amount of feedback once they upgraded their search. Their complaints dropped by 96%. With this sort of improvement you just know that the search is better.

So why are we releasing this tool for free? It’s not just because we’re generous and want to make the world a better place. We are very much a business and this may raise our profile and help us find more customers. If you sign up and look like a good fit for our technology then we’ll be in touch with you. There are lots of enhancements we could make to this tool – let us know if you have any ideas.

You can sign up to use the feedback tool here. Enjoy.