The Maine SEO Blog

In May, Google announced they’d be adding more to the “Suggest” function. Up until now, I hadn’t noticed; but perhaps that’s because I rarely search from google.com.

Yesterday, I found it helpful:

However, if, as Search Engine Land suggests, there will be AdWords included Suggest, I can only imagine this space will be overcrowded in no time.

That begs the question…

Isn’t less more?

Time and time again, seemingly simplistic interfaces seem to become complicated. Look at Facebook and Twitter…

Facebook added a news feed, which has more recently become a real time news feed. Certainly, there are reasons for such changes; but at a certain point is evolving for just evolution’s sake?

Twitter recently added a retweet function from its website. Seemingly helpful, it’s done nothing other than muddle up the simplistic interface they had going. This function, in particular, received nothing but bad reviews.

Certainly Google couldn’t be the next monopoly to be pressured to overcrowd in an effort to be cutting edge. Dearest Google, simple is good. Simple is why you are king.

Fortunately, more often than not, Google will test ideas relentlessly before they leave Labs. But it’s something to think about.

Nicki Hicks
Website minimalist

Google rolled out the Intelligence feature a few months back, but it was only showing up on select accounts at that time. Now, it appears to be available for all accounts. In your Analytics, you’ll see a curious new navigation tab.

What’s so great about it?

Instead of checking every nook and cranny in your Analytics, simply go to the Intelligence section and check out your alerts.

Google will automatically alert you for significant changes in all of your main dashboard items:

• Traffic
• Pageviews
• Pages/visit
• Bounce Rate
• Average Time on Site
• New Visitors

There are also a few added bonuses. You can sort your alerts by day, week, or month to get a more specific view or the one from 20,000 feet. Like custom reports, you can also create custom alerts – if you’d like the GA assistant to ping you if a particular statistic changes significantly.

Don’t be too critical, Intelligence is still in beta. All things considered, it’s an intuitive (and quick) way to check any unusual (good or bad) behavior on your site.

Nicki Hicks
Google’s so Intelligent