Brands vs Query Refinement: Is Google Using The Second Search?
Patrick Altoft highlighted how Matthew Trewhella (from Google) may have tipped Google’s hand a bit about what was known as the Vince / brand update: Matthew [said] the brand update is about Google minimising the number of times people have to search to find the products or information they are looking for. Every time a user has to perform a second search Google regards it as their failure for not bring up the right result the first time. So what Google is doing is testing which results are going to give the least number of secondary searches and displaying those. In the past somebody might have searched for “travel insurance” and found a few good sites before remembering that the Post Office does travel insurance too and searched for them to get a comparison. For Google this is regarded as a bit of a failure because they didn’t bring up the Post Office in the first place. Understanding the bold part above also highlights why Google dislikes many affiliate based business models. Google
