Seems Google has gone crazy integrating its map application into the search results these days. At first it required a town reference to be included in the search words to invoke a mapped response, but now it seems any number of things can cause Google to show you a map. One would think they are monetizing the views they get so much play.

And these results are not in the usual third spot - pushing down (to many of my clients’ complaints) regular listings to below the fold. But hey it is their company and their presentation – we can always go elsewhere…. Yeah right.

So what is happening? I was doing a search for a conference when I first noticed this happening. You would think Google would use a little more exact matching when evoking the map option – but obviously not. My brother was coming to San Francisco for a medical conference but I did not know  which one so I did a ssearch – San Francisco medical conference. You would think it was specific enough… I did not realize it was too specific. The number one result as shown below was for a specific conference room.

This had me curious to see what other gems I could come across. In the process I started to see just how much Google has dialed up their map inclusion. But also the randomness of how and where they will put them. So I did a couple of searches for city based conferences in industries that should have enough strength on their own to dominate the results.

First I did one for New York search conference and as you can see below Search Engine Strategies pulls off the number one spot with a map – am starting to think it is like music charts and they should be thought of as bullets.

So I continued on the search conference quest and this time did Philadelphia. Here the multi-mapped results appear in the third spot. But the results are for specific hotels with no connection in the results to a search conference. Come on Google where is the good user experience in this listing.

Okay maybe I have been picking terms that just contradict this intrusion of map results. Let’s see what other conference results bring. Let’s try Chicago and travel. What does Chicago travel conference bring? Local business results for travel conference near Chicago – top result 10 mapped hotels with no direct connect to a travel conference. I would be annoyed if I was trying to get my site seen in this space and the maps push me off the top area.

So let’s try one more – Philadelphia travel conference – not a town known for holding travel conferences, yet there they are again at the top – though this time it is only 3 results.

What is going on here Google? You expect us to follow standards you set out but seem to throw up results any which way you want. I may have to take this one up with Matt Cutts, it looks like there are Googlers spamming their own SERPs with irrelevant results.  When you start charging for the business listings that help generate the map results it may all become clearer, or are you just running behavioral tests on your users? If that is the case the government may soon have something to say about that.

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Google Mapping Out Its Search Results

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 9:17 am and is filed under Search News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.