Google Onebox Rumormill
For those that haven’t noticed, Google Onebox has been on vacation at some datacenters. This has led to my inbox getting rumors into it. To discuss this, I have David with me on the podcast, but his comments won’t be on the blog post. So, here are some of the rumors that have been going around and a few of my thoughts.
1) More Onebox Options
There are plenty of options already, but I could see more content being highlighted being a good thing.
2) Onebox Showing More Often
It’d be nice to get them showing more often, for more general phrases. The specific phrases are nice, but they seem so useful that broadening them to show more seems like it could be a great experiment at the minimum.
3) Images on Product Onebox Results
I think it goes without saying that images get more attention and sell products better, so this would be a huge improvement.
4) … and larger oneboxes for all.
The larger Local Onebox has really sparked a lot of interest in having the rest of them made larger, and I’d personally like to see this. I’m sure some people wouldn’t care and others don’t want it at all, but we’re doing well with them so I’d like to see them bigger.
5) No more SERPs
Danny Sullivan has talked about this before, but the recent comments from Matt Cutts about SERPs in SERPs really made this start seeming like it could be coming sooner than we think.
I can’t confirm any of these rumors, but the smart marketers will be prepared for any changes coming up, and that means considering all the “What ifs”. You’ll have to evaluate them for yourself, but know that there could be some changes coming soon.
Comment by Christal Condon | March 24th, 2007
OneBox is the most underutilized real estate on the internet. By this I mean marketers should be investing serious resources to improving their product feeds to google base (so they actually show up for product searches and for FREE)!! There is so much buzz about SEO and SEM but I think OneBox is the easiest homerun marketing “channel.” If and when google makes the decision to start charging advertisers for product clicks I am buying google stock. (maybe Google is saving this advertising cash cow for a rainy day) Advertisers who have invested the resources and energy in structuring their data (both in their CMS and ultimately in their data feeds) will reap major benefits in q2/q3 and maybe even q4 until the rest of the market catches up. I think the addition of attributes will be a critical piece in dominating GoogleBase product results and ultimately OneBox. Great blog Brian. Will definitely continue to read.