I had been trying to write about this for sometime now. Early this month google announced a secondary search feature to their search..
Try going to google.com
Type in “Best Buy” you will see the search returns a tons of pages
The first listing is obviously BestBuy.com but just below that there is second search bar “Search Best Buy”
Type in “camcorder” click on Seach Best Buy button
You will see many results but see what is happening to the rightmost screen. You will see more targeted ads from other competitors. In other words google is selling adspace on secondary search results.
the results returned from that search have nothing to do with Best Buy.com or its products or bestbuy as a company.
Is Google very selective with this strategy?
Now go back to www.google.com and search for the term “Costco” you will see there is no secondary seach for COSTCO there..
Why?
May be there are not many competitor ads for COSTCO in the secondary search and hence Google did not care to put a secondary seach on the results page.
May be there is more to this..but what I have heard is BESTBUY.COM is not using Google appliance for their site search.
So no matter how well google can crawl BestBuy.com it cannot effectively inxdex certain pages that the native search on bestbuy.com can do. So
the results returned are more or less incomplete when the site is not using google appliance or google search on the site (Assuming google is
integrating the local site index into the global search)
As a advertiser I love this feature because I can get more targeted traffic, traffic that I can take away from my competitor.
As a buyer, I completely dislike this feature, because when I am lead to believe that a site search is happening on BestBuy for my search term, I would like to get back the best and most relevant results, that includes products, discounts, promotions and information and anything else.
If you have read this post this far..and if you are serious of buying something on best buy go to bestbuy.com and perform a local search on the site..see if you are getting a good discount,
Try going to google and do a secondary search for that discount..see if Google is returning the same link.
I bet it will not..but I am testing..:)-