blended perspectives: MT-RefSearch to the Rescue! is a brilliant little script for MT. It detects if an in-bound reader is coming from a google search and displays a local set of search results at the top of the page based on the google query that led to them. This can quickly route users to an MT post that may have slid of the home page since Google last indexed it.
This takes an approach I often use at work in a completely new-to-me direction. I always make sure that our PR folks keep us up-to-date on media mentions of our organization so that I can get a link and/or a blurb on our home pages that will quickly direct those users to info relevant to the media exposure that guided them to us. Gotta grab those people right off the bat if we’re going to engage them.
I had never considered applying the same approach to in-bound searchers from Google and other seach engines. We could even create special messages for certain keywords that are hot-button issues for us in addition to supply our local search results for their query.
I need to think this through a bit more but it is a fascinating idea. Thanks for the idea Eliot!
C. David Gammel, CAE 
Wow, you bring some great new ideas for my little script. I was hoping that someone might think of further uses for this.. looks like you’ve done it! Sites could *easily* put up special notices for “in-bound” searchers. Neat idea.. let me know what you come up with!
David thanks for posting this … I have had a similar feature implemented on my site for the last year or more (it works for several popular search engines and fires up a new search window) but currently it is turned off … I am now thinking about switching it back on 🙂
I love the idea of special messages for certain keywords … the idea had actually flittered through my mind in the past but always seemed a little complex to implement but maybe with a little ingenuity I could solve that ….
From my referral log I so often see people come into my site from a search engine – clearly looking for something but having been directed to an off topic page and then leaving even though my site is packed with material on exactly what I think they were looking for …
Like you … I need to think a bit more about this … lets exchange ideas ….
My main concerns about implementing it are:
1. Not impairing the usability of the page when displaying a special message based on search keywords (basically not obscuring the original content of the page);
2. Making sure the script doesn’t impose any load problems for the rest of our site;
3. Developing a process for identifying and maintaining our hot-topic keywords and creating special messages for them. If supporting content for those topics doesn’t exist yet we’ll need to do that as well.
That last one is likely to be the hard part. The technology is easy. 🙂