Here’s the New Structured Snippets Google Just Released to Search Results

by | Tech News

Here’s the New Structured Snippets Google Just Released to Search Results
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Google has introduced what the search engine is calling “structured snippets”. While information like this isn’t new for the search engine what it presents is slightly unique. Here’s an image that shows how these are implemented:

Google Web Search has evolved in recent years with a host of features powered by the Knowledge Graph and other data sources to provide users with highly structured and relevant data. Structured Snippets is a new feature that incorporates facts into individual result snippets in Web Search. As seen in the example below, interesting and relevant information is extracted from a page and displayed as part of the snippet for the query “nikon d7100”: Research Blog: Introducing Structured Snippets, now a part of Google Web Search

So where do these come from and can you do anything to ensure you’re sites get these results?

Google says these results are gathered from a effort by the Google Research and the WebTables teams:

“We use machine learning techniques to distinguish data tables on the Web from uninteresting tables, e.g., tables used for formatting Web pages. We also have additional algorithms to determine quality and relevance that we use to display up to four highly ranked facts from those data tables.”

The simple answer is to ensure you are using markups and rich snippets on your sites. Also think about the structure of your webpages and are you presenting the information for your products or your services in a such a way that can be categorized. That means you might have to redesign sections of your site that provide this information that is not only helpful to your visitor but also a benefit of any “machine” that might be viewing your content. This is generally a good practice even if this new change in search results didn’t pop up.

As with everything that Google launches in it’s search results this is something that will change or could go away at any time. I still feel it’s important to mark up your content/core pages with relevant meta data that helps define what that content is about.