On Thursday, Google announced a new service in the labs: Related Links
Last week, we quietly rolled out Google Related Links, which lets you display a unit of useful links on your web site related to your site’s content, including relevant news, searches, and web pages. It is a great way to add fresh, dynamic content to your web site, and it is amazingly easy to use.
It’s pretty cool. They give you a piece of JavaScript (if you view the source of this page from the dltj website you’ll see it included near the very bottom of the code) to add to your page. When the browser renders the page, you get an insert from Google with suggested web pages, search query strings, and/or news items. You’ll see such an insert at the bottom of this page. (Once again, you won’t see it through the RSS feed — you’ll need to actually come to the web site to see it.)
So here’s what I’m thinking — what if this was added to an OPAC bibliographic record display? Google is scanning the source of the page looking for keywords, so pulling out all of the basic bib data should provide a pretty good source for finding relevant pages. (Probably better than your average blog post, for instance.) This could be particularly useful if “Google Scholar” could be singled out as the source for the web links. (At least that would be more useful for the academic libraries among us…)
I don’t have an OPAC to play with — changes to the OhioLINK Central Catalog display would need to go through at least two statewide committees for approval. If someone tries this, could you report back a web address and the relative success of the effort?
(This post was updated on 15-Apr-2006.)
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4 Comments
It looks like a Google Ad. It’s just like it, except you wont get any money when people click on it. I think it’s too disruptive. You can subscribe to searches from a few search engines and get RSS feeds from them (for that search) and create your own ‘related links’ and it wont end up looking like an ad or drive traffic through Google.
It looks like a Google Ad, but it’s not quite. The results displayed are not “advertisements” as such — they are (presumably) suggested search strings, highly relevent web pages, and news stories related to the target page. And, as you point out, no money is changing hands. As proposed, that wouldn’t be the point. The desired effect would be to draw in web content relevant to the bibliographic record in the OPAC display. And, for academic libraries, this would be particularly useful if one could limit the scope of the content drawn in to the “Google Scholar” segment of their index.
I find it interesting that they run this through googlesyndication.com. I have adblocked scripts from that domain (why should they know all the sites I visit?), and so this page displays nothing at all for the related links.
I’ve read on some adsense blogs that this is an avenue for Google to generate advertisement revenue without having to share it. Obviously there was a bias in their discussion, but the appraisal wasn’t positive. The conclusion, in one instance, was that webmasters would not elect to put this feature on their site when they can get adsense, a similiar thing, and be paid for the clicks. Now I understand they’re not the same thing. But have you ever tried a related: search? It’s not exact science, I’m not convinced that it’s for anything other than geocities homepages.. I’ve seen uses of rss feeds of searches, however, that can do the same thing, and you can customize the look just the way you want.
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