Hopefully an API for the new beta labs project Google Related Links is on the roadmap. Without one, it’s worthless to me as a webmaster.

As a surfer/visitor I see some draw to it for convenience, but is it useful? Webmaster using Google Related Links can choose which of the three panes to show (or all three): news, search and websites.

When Yahoo did their contextual search they released as an API which gave webmasters much more customization possibilities. What I’d like to do is offer readers related content for our own sites and then a link to Google, Yahoo, etc so they can search from there. Heck, I’m guessing most people reading this right now have a search box to their favorite engine a short mouse click away. On certain posts I could see including this, particularly newsworthy posts.

Google (finally) worries about new release scaling?
For the first time with any Google release I’m seeing a message that Google wants webmasters to contact them if they do more than 10,000 visitors a day and want to use Google Related Links. Can these webmasters also access a special API to tap into the related search technology? That would be sweet. It’s smart for them to identify that it’s different asking webmasters with 100 visitors a day putting up some javascript than copy/pasting to a site doing 10,000+. A lot of these new web pooh point oh apps don’t seem to take this into consideration.

Example showing news only
Here is an example showing only news in a 468×60 banner like style. Do you like it? I can see the value of adding something like news only somewhere on some of our sites (maybe here).

And if you don’t see this above then this means it doesn’t work inserted into a Wordpress post without some additional code voodoo. That will lower adoption rate too.

Would this add value to your reading experience?
My personal opinion is that it would be better if we could tap into an API and include on only certain posts in certain situations (like Yahoo allows). Also it’s javascript loaded which means it could slow down page loads if Google has server trouble. That’s not far-fetched considering some of their past launch experience. The Adsense ads are javascript loaded and that hasn’t been problematic there but Google might be underestimating the value of web real estate. To get me to add something to every page or even most pages of a website I want:

1. to really, really like something and/or
2. find it really, really useful to site members or visitors (navigation, copyright, etc) or
3. it needs to make money (pay for its real estate presence)

I’m not sure Google Related Links does any of these things, although it’s way early and if they run out an API with it, I can see some definite possibilities. Another downside: since it’s javacript that means it won’t show up in some RSS aggregators.

Your turn. Do you see this as helpful and useful or page clutter? Your thoughts on this in the comment/trackback section would be greatly appreciated, as always.

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