Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy, Revised and Updated

DETERMINING INTENT

Most searches are short because of what economist and psychologist Herbert Simon called bounded rationality.3 We exert the smallest effort (short queries) to get an adequate result. We exert more effort (query refinement) only if the initial work didn’t get us what we needed.

Google’s quality guidelines give an example of how difficult it can be to determine intent from a single-word query:

Someone searching for [calendar] could be looking to find and print a calendar for the current month. Or they could be looking for a calendar of holidays. Or they could be looking for an online calendar to use for appointments.

Google breaks the query interpretation into three categories:

• Dominant interpretation
• Common interpretations
• Minor interpretations

Some of the factors that Google uses to determine intent include:

• Current events: The searcher likely wants the latest of something (such as latest sports scores versus historical ones).
• Location: If the query is regional in nature but doesn’t include a location, the searcher likely is interested in their current location (such as local pizza restaurants versus national ones).
• Previous behavior: Google uses both overall searcher behavior in aggregate and individual searcher behavior to predict current intent.

Intent factors heavily into how search results are generated globally and in personalized results (discussed in Chapter 5).

The easiest way to find out what search engines have learned about searcher intent is to ...