A mysterious "See results for..." from Google

[tahnan]

I'm used to Google offering to show me results for related searches; I very rarely, if ever, want those results (unless I've misspelled something), but it's genuinely innocuous. But can someone explain this? (Just in case Google is set up differently for you and all those ampersands don't force the page to display what I got: I searched "family album" (not in quotes), and it asked if I wanted to see results for "littlewoods", which as phrases go isn't all that close to the original, other than being the same number of letters.)

Comments

[q-pheevr.livejournal.com]

Well, searching for "family album" littlewoods turns up this:

[F]or those shoppers looking for Kays Ireland, or Family Album Ireland, these two catalogues have now been amalgamated into the Littlewoods Ireland operation, as of June 30th, 2007.

So I guess some people searching for Family Album might find it useful to be directed to Littlewoods, but for the rest of us it's just confusing.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Ah! I'd searched for the three words without quotes, and either that hit didn't come up early enough, or I skimmed right over it. So there is in fact a connection between the two terms (and DTM, below, explained nicely why, contrary to my expectations, those terms aren't autogenerated from a spellchecker-like list).

[dtm]

I'm not privy to the full details - mostly because I haven't looked - but those "see results for" results are built out of what people search for next (*) (an embarrassment for us was to discover that the suggested search for some searches was "yahoo", implying that people did that after google had given particularly bad results).

So apparently a large number of people, after searching for "family album", search for "littlewoods" without clicking on any of the results first.

Admittedly, this does seem to be evidence that related search suggestions are not as tightly geographically scoped as perhaps they should be.

(*) Surprisingly, (with one well-publicized exception) this applies to spelling correction suggestions as well.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Huh. Well, and now I know.