Late March, Google announced that it was going to make two variations to its search engine results, the first of which I will deal with here. Herein, at the bottom of the results pages, Google will give you ‘more useful related searches’ to the expression that you have just searched for. They quote that their algorithms “understand” the search term and can therefore throw up some useful, related search expressions. It’s a handy feature and it would be interesting to know more about the relative strengths of the ‘related searches’ to the original search. For example, I searched the term ‘Bebo’ and was returned these as ‘related’ searches: 
On the face of it, they all seem very ‘handy’ alternative expressions. But I question why these particular expressions were chosen. If you look at these in the Google Keywords Tool you get their search volumes: 
Bebo Stuff at 590 seems relatively weak in comparison to the other suggestions. Working with Google’s keyword tool can show you ideas based on the keyword of “Bebo”. It suggested phrases (and their search volumes) like Bebo Page (33,100) and Bebo Sign in (201,000). Frankly I would think that these might have made the list instead of ‘Bebo stuff’! As an addendum: weeks later the suggestion has not change. I thought it might be picking up on current search phrases or indeed some seasonal bias, but obviously not I think the suggestion is a good idea – I am just curious as to the actual strength of relevancy to the original. Another small insight into the suggestions is via geography. If you are using Firefox you can pick up a nifty little extension from Redfly which allows you to instantly see searches in different Google locations. The Search expression for Bebo yielded very similar results across a few search engines. However, just to highlight this, here are the related searches for the expression “search engine” in: Ireland and UK (actually they are nearly always the same) 
Google Australia 
Google Canada. 
The Hitwise data for Canada gives a list of the search engines market share and therefore I cannot for the life of me see why Altavista and Lycos would be included in a related search.
