Search Engine Tigers

This advanced operator has apparently been around in Google Experimental for over a year, but since I only came across it recently, it’s new to me, so maybe it is to you.

So what does view:map do? Basically, by adding it to the end of any regular query in Google, you’ll get a results page with a map, and on that map will be markers, and a list of listings that contains some form of geographic identifier. As you can see below posts of mine talk about trips I’ve taken and trips I’m about to take.

Now there are some false positives, I’ve never talked about Texas, but as my name appears on a popular blog near where someone else talks about working for a firm in Texas, it’s picked up, but on the whole it’s pretty good about showing the right results.

So how can this help you? Well, potentially it can enable you to see what locations your product is being talked about in conjunction with (note, not necessarily where the people that are talking about your product are). Sure only 10 listings doesn’t give you much, so go ahead and add &num=100 to the query string to get up to 100 results that mention geo-terms and see what happens. Below is the result for “Specialized Information Publishers Association”

As you can see there’s discussion about their conferences in DC, Chicago, their headquarters in McLean (hey, they’re just around the corner from me), talk about a sponsor in Hawaii, and about a board member from London. How can this help them? Well let’s say that there was a groundswell of SIPA members talking about how there really needs to be a conference in Lancaster, PA. The fact that that location would show up on this map would give them that information, and they could then investigate to see whether there really was any kind of demand for moving one of their conferences out to NYC strip mall shopping central Amish country.

All in all it’s an interesting tool, but there are some false positives that show up in the system that detract slightly from the results, which is probably why it’s still in Google Experimental. Anyway, go give it a play, and if you think of some great use for it, please share.