I am puzzled by the idea that user searching for ‘orlando pizza’ could be seen as having equal intent as a user searching for ‘pizza’. I would assume that a user searching for ‘pizza’ might well be looking for a local pizza, but they might also be looking for pizza recipes, diet information about pizza or what have you. Does it not strike you, Steve, that the simplicity of a search like that makes the intent more vague?

Miriam

1. The Onebox results are growing their share of clicks from the SERPs pages on which they appear

2. The amount of local search traffic is growing dramatically per the above analysis and other factors, so the pages that appear below the Onebox results can still grow click volume even if their total share of clicks is declining

I completely agree with your point that geo modifiers will not go away easily, I don’t think they will go away at all as a matter of fact.

What I do disagree with is that users who search for “Orlando pizza” have less intent than someone who searches “pizza”. Just because the user didn’t enter a geo modifier doesn’t mean they wouldn’t like local results. We can’t expect users to adapt to the search engine the search engine (and our marketing) must adapt to them.

I would prefer if Google would just start using browser awareness and simply including the Onebox and keeping the natural results as a default for search terms like “pizza”.

I’m really impressed with your article. It’s definitely gotten a few of us around our office talking about this topic. But I’ve come up with a criticism here…

When someone types in the term “pizza” (to use your example above), they’re more than likely searching with less intent than someone who would type in, “orlando pizza,” or even further, “32801 pizza”. Geo-modifiers show real intent on a product or service. Whereas searches without geo-modifiers can really have any intent and any reason.

To me, that says that “the downfall of geo modifiers” can’t go away so easily. Sure, as technologies increase, browser location awareness increases, etc., people will start to catch on to these innovations in search. However, essentially, this is just trying to teach people a new way to search, which could take quite some time.

Just my two cents