“The Usability Impetuous Behind Google+ Local…”
Aaron Bradley dropping some Local knowledge, along with a lot of other knowledge, in his fantastic post about the Semantic Web:
“…search is no longer about words, but about the things to which the words on a web page describe and make reference…”
“Why is this important? It’s important because when Google receives a user query it’s increasingly not trying to provide a match for the query keywords, but (informed, whenever it’s possible for them to do, by the context of the query) to understand the meaning underlying the query, and then return information about the entities it has identified.”
“The process of navigating to web pages, and moving back and forth between search results and the web pages they reference, is trivial on desktop computers but a royal pain on a hand-held mobile device.
This situation provides a compelling incentive for the search engines to circumvent additional web page visits altogether, and instead present answers to queries – especially straightforward informational queries – directly in the search results.
While many in the search marketing field have suggested that the search engines have increasingly introduced direct answers in the search results to rob publishers of clicks, there’s more than a trivial case to be made that this is in the best interest of mobile users. Is it really a good thing to compel an iPhone user to browse to a web page – which may or may not be optimized for mobile – and wait for it to load in order to learn the height of the Eiffel Tower?
This also sheds considerable light on the usability impetuous behind Google+ Local. A well-formed Google+ Local Page enables Google to display things like business hours and an interactive map in a mobile-friendly fashion in response to a query like “Jones Aquarium Supplies” (which is, of course, an entity).”
I believe this is one of the most forward looking pieces on where Search is going http://t.co/O9v6CjXsQJ by @aaranged
— Dennis Goedegebuure (@TheNextCorner) June 18, 2013
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