3 ms·
> Nit: this article is really criticizing a UI change which makes local results more prominent [...] The local results at the top of the page when you search fo
by leoc 13y ago
> Nit: this article is really criticizing a UI change which makes local results more prominent [...] The local results at the top of the page when you search for "Italian restaurants" are all still organic.
I have yet to experience the Google carousel for myself, but aren't these results all coming from Zagat or G+? So these may not be paid (or pay-for-prominence) results, but they're not the results of a Web search; instead they're the results of a search of a proprietary, Google-controlled database. That's not just giving local results more prominence, that's moving a large part of the page to a whole different kind of search: from Web-crawling to searching a Google-owned and -"curated" database. And in many ways that's more important than whether the results are 'organic' in the narrow sense of 'not play-to-play'.
- saalweachter 13y agoI'm pretty sure Google Maps predates both Google+ and the Zagat acquisition by a large margin.
- leoc 13y agoOf course it does, but what's your point here? I said that the carousel is space given over to results from non-Web search, not just space given over to local results. The fact that there was already a chunk of the results page given over to non-Web search results doesn't alter the fact that the carousel is a new, further large chunk of space handed over to non-Web search results.
- saalweachter 13y agoThe point is that calling Google Maps anything but organic is wrong by any useful definition of organic. It's fine to argue about whether Google should be showing anything but ten blue links (maps, images, calculator results...) But refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of searching anything but web pages is just absurd.