Universal Local Search and Direct Navigation

By Michael Gray
In Google  

So here’s an interesting little discovery, type the following into your FF address bar

Museum of Modern Art

You should be directed to http://moma.org/

Now try the following:

Museum of Modern Art NY
Museum of Modern Art New York
Museum of Modern Art Manhattan

Even though the #1 result is the same site you “activate” the google local universal search part of the programming and get SERPS with local listings and maps as seen below.

Now for those of you who think it’s just a location being in the query string try this:

Museum of Modern Art Los Angeles

What happens … you get directed to http://www.lacma.org/ because [Museum of Modern Art Los Angeles] doesn’t have a local/universal search listing (if google isn’t smart enough to know los angeles is a local term they really have issues). So it appears local/universal search gets activated when there is a local listing for a particular search term not just the presence of a local term in the query.

So what you say, [Museum of Modern Art City Name] traffic isn’t very monetizable. Well instead of just changing the “city name” part of the query you change the ‘Museum of Modern Art” part as well. And if you were a nefarious type of person you could “help” google by adding a local listing, making sure searchers come to a SERP page giving someone other than the #1 listing a shot at some traffic … not that I’m suggesting or advocating that tactic … nope not me …

Popularity: 13% [?]

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