website design, optimisation and content

When are search results not search results?

Posted by Peter Labrow on 1 December 2009

What if Google doesn’t plan to rule the world by search, but by being the commercial gatekeeper to just about everything you can buy?

There’s a word that’s common within the IT industry: disintermediation. It basically means the removal of the intermediary in the supply chain. A good example might be that of a computer manufacturer who has traditionally worked through a network for partners decides to sell direct – and at a lower price. The partners helped build the success of the computer company, but now they’re not needed and are discarded.

While looking for some cinema listings the other day, Google started offering me search results in a way that I didn’t expect. I searched for ‘Cineworld Didsbury’ – a cinema local to me.

Google then surprised me by offering me the information I needed, but not via the usual search results pages. I expected to see a list of cinemas, complete with a link to Cineworld, which I then expected to follow to query film titles and times. What I actually got, without leaving Google, were the film titles and times themselves.

Google shows me what I would find on the cinema website, without actually having to go there

I also got ratings for each film, film durations and genre, plus contact details for the cinema. But no link to the cinema website itself. Google was showing me the information I would find on the cinema website, without me actually having to go there.

Clicking on one of the links for a film, I then expected to be taken to the Cineworld website. But no. I now get a cast list, a synopsis of the film, reviews from different websites – and a list of alternative places to watch the film. Even clicking on the cinema links on this page does not take me to any of the cinemas.

Cineworld Didsbury was the cinema for which I was looking, but now I have a bigger choice.

On both pages, I have other useful links, such as to change the date for which I want movie times, and a map showing the relative locations of different cinemas.

Google is separating out film information from normal website results.

You may notice on the screenshots that the Google search bar has now spawned another button. So, I can find the cinema I want by typing its name again and clicking on ‘search the web’.

But that’s hardly obvious. Most people would, once they have the information they need, get in the car and go watch the film. If they wanted to book on line, they’d have to dig for that link direct to the cinema.

This is a new twist to search engine results – and one with some pretty big implications.

Yes, Google is offering me relevant information. It’s giving me what I need, without me having to dig for it. But in doing so, it’s disintermediated the cinemas themselves.

None of us have actual written contracts with Google. But what we expect is that Google is an engine for presenting our websites and not just the information on them.

In the cinema example, not only does Google make it slightly convoluted to find the actual website itself, it actually presents a list of competitors. You could argue that this offers the consumer more choice, but if you were the cinema, and someone has searched for your cinema exclusively, then you could credibly argue that Google is potentially driving business away from you, despite you being the most relevant search result.

If you run a training company, how would you feel if, when people searched for you by name, it listed your courses (rather than a link to your website), reviews of the courses (over which you have no control), and direct links to competitors who are running the same courses? Not chuffed, I’d say. But there’s no reason why Google won’t – at some point – operate in this way.

The big implications are that in these circumstances your website is irrelevant. Google’s not pulling all of the information associated with your product/service from your website – other than the product title and times. It’s not sending people exclusively to your website either.

And what if Google decides to go a step further, and take the bookings itself, rather than, in the first instance, offering links to your shopping cart pages? At the moment, using Google AdWords is voluntary – you choose if you pay Google. But it’s possible that Google could become the world’s biggest middleman/aggregator, taking payments and making purchases on the searchers’ behalf. The only way the searcher interfaces with your website is via Google’s payment API.

This may be paranoid thinking, but most of the actual elements to do this are in place, apart from the specific product knowledge needed to make it work. (Google Maps, plus Google Checkout, plus the information from your website combined with customer ratings and reviews from other websites, stitched together with product descriptions from the originating product manufacturer’s website.) Cinema listings are relatively simple; it would be so much harder to achieve the same things for books, CDs, training courses, holidays, cars – you name it – but it could be done.

Simple, you say: we’ll just opt out. We won’t let Google sell our services. We’ll only sell them over the phone. Bully for you – but can you risk your competitors doing the same thing? Will they think that it’s better to make the sale and lose a percentage than not make the sale?

Then Google doesn’t just take revenue from advertisers. It takes it from everyone. And your on-line brand counts for what, exactly?

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