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July 20, 2006

Google Search Designed for the Blind

Part of the reason Google is so far ahead of other search engines in market share is that they continue to roll out new features at a breakneck pace. Not all of them hit the mark, but they keep people talking about Google.

Google just released search designed for the visually impaired. Developed by T.V. Raman, a blind research scientist with Google, it uses accessibility as an important factor in ranking pages. T.V. Raman says on the Google Blog:

Like most of you, when I search the web, I want to find relevant information with a minimal amount of distraction. But because I can't see and I use a device that converts web text to speech, I'm even more in tune with the distractions that can sometimes get in the way of finding the right results. If the information I'm after is on a visually busy page, I have to sort through that page to find the text I want--an extra step that can sometimes be very time-consuming.

In general, good accessibility equals good SEO: Simple pages heavy on content and lean on the graphics and other non-informational gunk are the way to go, and a page that's easy to access for a blind reader is going to be easily processed by search engines.

Phillip Lessen has also developed a neat tool to compare results between Accessible Search and Google's regular search results, and Reuters has a good review.

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