Google Changes “Preferences” to “Search Settings”

I might be slow but today I noticed that Google has moved and renamed the link to Preferences. Previously, there was a link to search preferences just under Advanced Search near the Search button. Now Google is calling this feature, Search Settings, and moved the link to the top right corner. 

In our company, we frequently change search settings to look at different results. There are a couple reasons why we make changes. First, if a page that we are optimizing is in the top 10 result – great. But occasionally, pages are lower especially at the beginning of a campaign. In this case, we need to see where the page is ranking for a specific keyword phrase. We change our settings to expand the results so that we can quickly find where a webpage is ranking for a specific keyword phrase. To do this we click the Search Settings link and change the Number of Results from the default of 10 to 100 results per page. Then we use Ctrl-F and the company’s URL to find the page we are looking for. The position of the listing on the scroll bar is a quick way to estimate where the page is within the 100 results. If we need a precise ranking number we switch back to the default of 10 results and page down and find the listing manually. Or we will run a ranking report to get the full list of keywords and their positions.

Another reason we may change the settings to 100 results per page is to see which pages might be used as an alternative in the SERP. For example, if you search for “business laptops” in Google.com you will see one listing for Dell, www.dell.com/business/laptop. If you change your settings to 100 results per page you will see 2 results. The second result is indented, http://www.dell.com/us/en/dfb/notebooks/ct.aspx?refid=notebooks&cs=28&s=dfb. It is our experience that this second listing is Google’s way of testing additional pages. Most people performing searches won’t see this indented page but some will.