14 May 09 And after all, you’re my Wonder Wheel…

You could never accuse Google of being innovators.  but what you can applaud them for is the ability of their engineers to develop existing ideas and bring them to the masses.  Like Apple, they seem to have a great way of taking something that is already there and making it more user friendly and appealing.  From the time when the original Google.com search engine launched and did away with every trick that existing search companies utilised to keep you on the page, they have been dedicated to bringing users and content closer together.

The latest shiny toy that Google have “invented” is the fantastically named Wonder Wheel for those who haven’t seen it yet, you access it via the new “show options” link at the top of the search results, and it looks like this:

Essentially, its a nice Ajax implementation that fits in with the standard Google design aesthetic of less is more, and allows users to explore concepts related to their original search.  It is almost the same as the interface that Quintura uses - although rather than producing a tag cloud, Google produces a nice little spider chart.  FYI, since about 3 people have ever visited Quintura, it looks like this:

What I like about this is that while it keeps people on the search engine for longer, it makes it much more straightforward to refine the search. and even encourages people to look into different areas - after all, how many times have you been to Wikipedia to check a quick “fact” before finding yourself diverted into a vortex of articles about everything related to the main subject before emerging blinking a week later, none the wiser about what you were originally looking for.

The impact that I see coming from Wonderwall wonder wheel is a better quality of user coming through to the website.  My theory behind this is that if a user has refined their search, they are more likely to be satisfied with the results that they get, and less likely to bounce out.  So, the question is, how do you check if a user has visited from search results refined via Wonder Wheel?

Like this:

Any visitor to the website who has used wonder wheel to refine their search will come complete with a referrer string that includes tbs=ww:[somenumber]&, which means that you can compare the bounce rates that they have.

The only problem with testing this at the moment is that very few people outside the hallowed halls of SEO & Online Marketing are aware of the function, and since it is very new, it is pretty hard to get a decent sample.  Having said that, I’ll be keeping an eye on the traffic to a couple of websites with high numbers of natural search visitors so that I can copmpare the bounce rate for visitors who used Wonder Wheel, and those who did not.

I’ll post back with the results in a couple of weeks

Tags: Google, search engine optimisation, seo