Google Tips
This post was originally published on December 30, 2006.
There has been a been a bit of debate over the addition of “Tips” to the top of Google’s search results for some keywords. For good coverage of these, see Blake Ross’s post and Matt Cutts’ response.
 | Tip: Want to organize your schedule and share events with friends? Try Google Calendar |
Matt writes,
Furthermore, the triggers appear to match on substrings: if I type in “blogoscoped”, I’m looking for Philipp, not to create a blog.
This is easily confirmed by searching for something completely gibberish, like xcvhyomvyuzxycohasdfblogaudfiyoasdfyouiasdf, which suggests Blogger at the top of the results. Since there’s only room for one tip, though, these substring matches must be done in some order that implies something about the “importance” of each keyword. Or maybe not, but here’s the list:
- “photo sharing”
- calendar
- blog
- pictures, photos
Thus, if you search for a blog calendar, you’ll get the Google Calendar tip rather than the Blogger tip. This hints that Google’s code performs the substring matching in the reverse order of the list above.
Know of any others?
Update: Tips no longer show up in search results.