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September 19, 2006
URL Vs. Navigational Queries Explained: AKA, Why Did URL Searches At Google Change?
Matt Cutts from Google has a great follow up on our reports that Google Modifies Navigational Search Results from about two-plus weeks ago. In his post, he explains that when you search on a URL (i.e. www.searchenginewatch.com), Google has stopped showing the information for the URL and now shows a standard search on the words in the URL itself. I learned two things from Matt's post.
(1) Entering in the URL of a site into to a search box is not labeled as a "navigational search" it is labeled as a "URL search." Navigational searches are when you search on a company name, i.e. Search Engine Watch versus a URL search is when you search on a company URL, i.e. searchenginewatch.com.
(2) To a normal user, bringing back search results for a URL search is more useful then bring back the information on that URL, in Matt's opinion. If SEOs and webmasters want to pull that information, we still can still do this by using the info:www.domain.com command. It works like this for this blog, [info:blog.searchenginewatch.com] and it shows you information for this URL.
Posted by Barry Schwartz on September 19, 2006 8:51 AM
