Last week, I wrote about The Google Screw and how Google's "intention engine," as Tedster calls it at WebmasterWorld, can seriously hurt a business and the integrity of a solid search query. But Google is not stupid, they know what they are doing and they feel, for the most part, these types of changes will improve the overall search experience.
Tedster at WebmasterWorld has been one of the more vocal against Google telling you what you really wanted to search for. But he recently found a good use for it. Let me quote Tedster:
I helped a friend last week by cleaning up a smallish database (about 1,000 products) so that it could be used to generate web pages. The database was from his shipping facility and it was full of strange abbreviations so the field would print out on a small shipping document and a shelf label in the warehouse. So the product descriptions worked for the warehouse staff but they were far from doing the sales job they needed to do.Google's intention engine did the job. I just pasted in that mishmash directly and I usually got back what I was looking for, or at least I made enough progress so that I could make a second try and nail it.
Maybe Google's idea isn't so far off the mark after all.
Pretty neat - he plugged in the weird descriptions from the client into Google and Google told him what he really wanted to use for titles and descriptions. Not a bad use for this, don't you think?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
