Widgets and Search

So I’ve been trying to get my head around the recent news that Google is now allowing users to customize their search results with gadgets / widgets.

My initial take was that this meant that users could embed select Google Gadgets into their custom Google Coop search engines.

Google Coop is the service that lets you build your own search engine that defines which sites are included in the results pages.  What I expected to see was the ability to enhance these custom search engines with related Google Gadgets that you could assign to certain queries.

Upon digging into it, I discovered that I had it wrong.  Instead of allowing users to enhance their custom search engines with widgets, they are instead allowing users to enhance their organic search results pages with widgets.

It sort of works like an RSS subscription.  You choose Google Gadgets from publishers that you trust, and when you submit a Google query for which that publisher has a widget (assuming you are logged into Google), you’ll see that widget above your search results.  It’s pretty cool, but perhaps a bit too complicated to grasp and set up for the mainstream user.

But that doesn’t mean that widgets + search doesn’t have legs.  One of the big challenges for organic search is the lag between when a publisher pushes some content live, and when that data shows up in the organic search results.  Search is a three step process; 1) Spidering; 2) Processing; and 3) Indexing.  For all but the biggest sites, seeing your fresh content show up in the organic search results can take days, if not weeks.

Widgets / Gadgets solve this problem because they update dynamically, synched to the publisher.

So Google is already building a huge database of widgets / gadgets, with title and author information.  They also have interaction data such as views and embeds which could be used as a proxy for quality.

It’s not hard to imagine a world where users don’t have to subscribe to a specific Google Gadget.  Instead they could just opt in to widgets in general.  Or perhaps they'd have to opt out of widgets.  In this scenario, Google could serve the highest quality, most relevant widget above any search results page, in the process injecting fresh content for time sensitive queries like sports scores, weather, and stock quotes.

Widgets as a marketing tool.  Widgets as a branding tool.  Widgets as a user acquisition tool.  Widgets as a content generation tool.  Widgets as an advertising platform.  And now, widgets as search results.  Any wonder that guys like David Hornik are bullish on this space?

For more coverage, see Mashable and Steve Rubel.