Google search within a site made easier for navigational searches

On Wednesday, we noticed Google was starting to surface a search within box for some results for navigational searches:

It turns out it’s a wider roll-out by Google as the Official Google blog reports.

“However, one of the trends we noticed while studying teleporting was that there were lots of searchers who would type the name of a specific website as if they wanted to teleport, but would then immediately issue another more a refined search within this site.

Through experimentation, we found that presenting users with a search box as part of the result increases their likelihood of finding the exact page they are looking for. So over the past few days we have been testing, and today we have fully rolled out, a search box that appears within some of the search results themselves. This feature will now occur when we detect a high probability that a user wants more refined search results within a specific site. Like the rest of our snippets, the sites that display the site search box are chosen algorithmically based on metrics that measure how useful the search box is to users.”

The last sentence is interesting. We’ve certainly noticed a wide implementation across UK government websites.