As a marketing professional, it was very important for me to know how people are searching on search engine and how they follow up to get the desired result. Learning this would make me able to optimize the websites accordingly. Yesterday, I went to a college and asked 10 people to search for local restaurants on the most popular search engine i.e. Google. At that time, I was in Chicago to attend a business meeting and I visited the college there. People searched for "Chicago Restaurants" on Google. After survey I realized that 8 out of 10 people used Google Local Carousel results and rest 2 clicked on listing site i.e Yelp.
The eighth people attracted to the interesting Carousel results and they all followed the same procedure for searching. How they searched for their query? First of all they opened Google and typed "Chicago restaurants" in the search engine's query bar, and then they all came to see carousel results, local places listing i.e maps and the organic results including restaurant related websites and listing site i.e. yelp at position 3. First they looked at all the results to know what they get for their query, and then on finding interesting images at the top they hover over it and found that they are able to get large information about the restaurant and that information was satisfactory for them to decide which place they should select for their lunch or dinner.
What about the rest two people or how they have searched? The types their query as "Chicago restaurants" in Google's query bars and found the same results alike the above eight people, but the Google carousel result was not able to attract them. They have looked for organic results and found yelp at position 3 with the title something like "Find restaurants in your area", so they analyzed that they will get number of restaurants there. They opened it and found restaurant of their interest and then visited the website. Opening a website would counts as 1 visit in the analytic of that website and this is how online marketers came to know the number of visitors and their referrals. While working at DPFOC, a SEO company in Melbourne, I came to learn about the use and benefits of analytics and other website optimization factors and the ways to implement them.
At the end, I asked them to give their feedback on the search results and students gave different comments on this new feature. Some replied that this is an interesting feature and helped a lot in searching by providing detailed information like distance from my location, price, and highest rated by reviews. Some people replied that when we are in hurry, we just clicked on the website appearing in the top results as we do not have time to search for all results, but after this survey they realized that they were following the wrong way to search as it may be possible that they got business listing websites in the top results and then they have to search category or location on the local directory for their search and this will waste their time rather than saving it. It would be better if they look into local carousel results. One replied that the graphics or visual components make you salivate. It's a nice result compared to the text only. It immediately made people thinks of the type of food they might want to check out, as opposed to just names. The other benefits of carousel are allowing for quick viewing of many search results so that the viewer can find what they're looking for in a time-efficient manner, need to open fewer links for the query and at the same time the viewer ends up absorbing more media in that shorter amount of time.
The conclusion of the survey is that the carousel may have been populated via many ways and with this popularity people will understand its benefits. There are many benefits of this new feature and it will enhance user experience.
