Aaron Wall spotted Google showing Related Searches below search results. This is his image.

I really like these - we’ve been generating them for almost a decade. They made their first appearance on the original snap.com (which later became NBCi.com) using our GlobalBrain technology. We now show them on most of our customer’s site searches. Here they are on the Travel Channel:

Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Land asks how Google generates these. I’m guessing that they are popular search terms used to find that particular URL. As Barry pointed out, if you search for one of the suggestions, get more links, you’ll see the URL from SEObook ranking top.

This type of related search is reasonably popular on the site searches we host for our customers. Typically we will see about 5-10% of people who search will click on one of these links.

I came across a new search company today that I hadn’t heard of before: Velingo. It looks like they generate Related Searches to help improve the user experience. I’m a big fan of this and it’s an important and popular feature of our site search product.

It looks like Velingo is selling this as a service to web search companies. We sell our Related Searches to these companies as well- although it is a small part of our overall business. So although Velingo may be somewhat of a competitor to us I’m happy to highlight them. I hope their efforts bring more attention to, and increase demand for related searches. It’s such a useful feature.

I noticed recently that Amazon has started showing Related Searches on their search page.

I am a big fan of Related Searches. They offer a an easy, unobtrusive way of doing query refinement. This may be refining the query as “harry potter book 7″ does in the example above, or offering tangential, but related queries like star wars or lord of the rings. Related Searches are easy to use - you just click on them. They are unobtrusive - they only take up a line or two of text - so you can still see relevant search results above the fold. They are also very popular. We see about 25% of people who search will use the related searches.

I often recommend that people look to see how Amazon are doing things when they are making design decisions because Amazon put so many resources to put into testing so they can get the usability right. Even usability guru Jakob Nielsen defers to them, for example his newsletter today he cited Amazon as a positive example for the easiest way to enter state codes

In this case I take it as a complement that Amazon has finally started offering a feature which we have offered all of our site search customers for years. For example here’s a screen shot showing the related searches for tulips on FTD: