Determining Intent
Most searches are short because of what economist and psychologist Herbert Simon called bounded rationality.''3 We exert the smallest effort short queries to get an adequate result. We only exert more effort query refinement if the initial work didn't get us what we needed. Google's quality guidelines give an example of how difficult it can be to determine intent from a single-word query Someone searching for calendar could be looking to find and print a calendar for the current month. Or they...
Competitive Research
We've already seen some competitive research with the data available from the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Let's take a closer look. In the tool, competitive information shows up as a bar graph, and when you export the information, it shows up as a number between 0 and 1. Since this data is based on the competition for paid search terms, it may not correlate exactly with organic search, but it can provide a pretty good gauge to start from. For instance, consider the following four queries,...