query intent
Bone Marrow and Sweden’s Longest Border
Friday, June 29th, 2007 | query intent | 6 Comments
As SEOs, understanding the user intent behind a search query is important stuff (What is Java, anyhow?). I often browse through Google Trends and am intrigued by the results. Last night I checked in with Google Trends, to marvel at the latest buzz in cyber space, and saw an interesting result.
The keyphrase ‘bone marrow’, with a related search of ’sweden’s longest border’ were the 4th listing. huh. Try and understand the user intent behind that one! Is somebody walking sweden’s longest border as a charity drive for bone marrow research? Nope. Has a new study shown that the ‘bone marrow’ of people residing along ’sweden’s longest border’ are particularly adept to producing high volumes of ‘blood cells’? Still no.
Lucky for me, I had watched Are you Smarter than a Fifth Grader earlier in the evening along with who knows how many others across the country. (OK, the lucky part is debatable, but that’s beside the point.) In last night’s episode the $100,000 question was:
In humans, bone marrow produces which of the following types of blood cells?
A. Red
B. White
C. Both Red and White
A. Red
B. White
C. Both Red and White
The question immediately following was:
Sweden’s longest land border is with what other country?
Google Trends provides us with a snapshot of the output of user intent. We are challenged to navigate through clues, such as Google Trend’s Volcanic Hotness status and related searches, to and make sense of seemingly unrelated relationships between terms and understand user intent. Now that, is why I love SEO.