One of Amazon’s key to success has been their “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” program. What they’ve done is linked similarly themed items together - an extremely effective cross-selling and up-selling method.

I really am surprised that Google hasn’t found a way of doing the same thing. Sure, they have a “Find pages similar to the page” feature, but it’s not very effective. It lists other pages which use some of the same phrases, but it’s nowhere near as effective as Amazon’s program.

As a simple example, imagine if, after searching for “enlightenment”, you were presented with alternative phrases like “awareness”, “comprehension”, “critical thinking”, “philosophy”, “expanding the mind”, etc. Wouldn’t it be fantastic to see a little phrase saying

Googlers who searched for “enlightenment” were also interested in “ancient wisdom”.

Man, that would be astounding!

Well, until they develop this feature, I’ve manually extracted themes similar to those on this site, using a nifty piece of software called KeywordElite.  This program queries the Google, Yahoo, Ask and other databases to provide statistics on what people have searched for in the past 30 days.  It provides a unique insight into what other browsers are searching for.

All of the posts in this category will provide download files of related searches.  Useful stuff.