Keeping news on the down-low
| Friday, July 25th, 2008 | --Sean |
We have tons of enhanced search results that'll pop up for various types of search queries -- movies, athletes, landmarks, definitions, etc. However, they're almost always at the top of the page, even if they're not necessarily the most relevant result. We've gone in a slightly more interesting direction with our enhanced news results, throwing them into the mix with all of the other potential search results and ranking them accordingly. So, even though there's some interesting news about Amazon.com right now, it's probably not more important to you than going to the Amazon site and getting your shop on, and it'll show up appropriately further down in the list. If I were to put on my corporate hat (such a good hat), I might even go so far as to say that this move underscores our Open strategy in a big way -- we might be able to drive more traffic our way with a self-promoted internal result, but if there's another search result out there that's better, we'll put that first, no matter whose site it belongs to.