Search Engines

Today Google rolled out changes to its flagship product: web search.  The changes are clearly aimed at facilitating the searcher’s ability to find what they are looking for and find it in short order.  If you’re a search engine optimization (SEO) practitioner, your world is about to get more interesting.  For the rest of the planet, what can be expected from Google search results just got a whole lot better.  What’s new?

The updates include Search Options and enhanced search results featuring microformats for content such as reviews. Google provided a brief video introducing new functionality:

Search Options

Search Options allows the user to quickly refine search results by providing additional context to the search being made.  After making a query, a user has several options to further clarify or modify their search results, including:

• Refining results to videos, forums or reviews
• Specifying the time frame from which to display results
• The ability to augment search results with images from the sites returned
• Lengthening the amount of copy shown for each result
• Showing related search phrases
• Displaying related topics to the subject searched upon (“Wonder Wheel”)
• Viewing results on a timeline

The options above are available when viewing “all results.”  As criteria are applied, the user’s scenario changes.  For example, if the searcher specifies video results only, the options change, removing criteria which is not relevant, but adding other opportunities, like the ability to specify the duration of the videos displayed.

Search Result, Snippets and Microformats

In search results, Google is now also returning different information depending upon the the context of the information searched upon.  In Google’s words:

We call the set of information we return with each result a “snippet,” and today we are announcing that some of our snippets are going to get richer. These “rich snippets” extract and show more useful information from web pages than the preview text that you are used to seeing.

The example which Google provides shows a restaurant search in which the results display star ratings of a result right in the search result listing (as opposed to needing to go to a review site).  Snippets fundamentally change the function of search results.  How and what information to display regarding a particular topic or result is unclear, but what is clear is that this will be a feature which continually evolves.  Google’s blog posting continues to explain the role of Google and the community in defining the feature:

We can’t provide these snippets on our own, so we hope that web publishers will help us by adopting microformats or RDFa standards to mark up their HTML and bring this structured data to the surface. This will help people better understand the information you have on your page so they can spend more time there and less on Google. We will be rolling this feature out gradually to ensure that the quality of Google’s search results stays high.

These new enhancements to Google Search are highly significant; the most significant changes since Universal Search was introduced.

The impact to the Google searcher are clear: Search just got better.  What impact will this have on the SEO community?

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