If you do a search in Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Live Search, under some of the first search results that you see are extra sets of links to other pages on the same site. Google refers to these as site links and Yahoo calls them quicklinks. Microsoft has published at least one whitepaper that describes the kind of pages that show up in their site links as final destination pages. The site links that all three search engines show look very similar to each other. Can you identify which site links go with which search engine in the images below (hover over them to see which is from which search engine).
While these site links appear similar, one question that I have had is how does each of the search engines decide upon which pages to show as site links?
A patent filing Google published in 2006 describes their listings of internal site links, and may give some insight into the links that Google decides to show. The Microsoft paper also gives us an idea of what criteria they consider in providing those links. What about Yahoo?
Yahoo has been providing a single line of quicklinks under some search results for a few years now, not limiting themselves to the top search result for those queries. Google has just recently started showing single line site links in a similar manner.
A new whitepaper from Yahoo goes into a great amount of depth concerning how they may choose the site links that they show on their pages. In Quicklink Selection for Navigational Query Results, Yahoo tells us about the sources of information that they look at when deciding upon which links to use, the mathematical process behind choosing quicklinks, and some possible changes to quicklinks that they might pursue in the future.
Navigational Queries
One common thread behind the use of sitelinks by all three search engines is that the concept behind providing internal site links to pages on a site that shows up in search results is to improve the searching experience of people looking for information by providing links to pages within a site that searchers likely would want to find.
The types of queries that tend to trigger the appearance of sitelinks are navigational queries - searches where the searcher likely has an idea of the page or site that they want to find already, but doesn’t remember the exact web address, or URL, for that page or finds it easier to just type a query into a search box and click on a link. For example, if I want to go to the ESPN site, I’ll type “espn” into a search box instead of typing http://www.espn.com into my browser address bar.
If I do that in Google, I not only get a link to the homepage for ESPN, but also additional links for:
- College Basketball
- NBA
- NFL
- MLB
- The NHL
- Fantasy Games
- Scores
- Streak for the CASH
- More results
Oddly, Yahoo doesn’t provide quicklinks for that query, but Microsoft Live gives a set of site links that overlaps Google’s somewhat.
Source of Yahoo Quicklinks
The Yahoo paper tells us that they look at a number of sources to find good candidate pages for quicklinks:
- Query and click logs - navigational queries, how searchers reformulate their queries during query sessions, and which pages they click upon
- Toolbar and user trail data - looking at navigation patterns in the way that people browse a web site
- Webgraph information from hyperlinks - ranking the webpages within a site based upon how they are linked to from inside and outside of the site
- Information from social bookmarking websites - such as delicious.com and digg.com
- Sitemaps or server log information - provided by webmasters of a site
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