Google improves search

Last year, at our second search technology event, we announced Google Squared and Rich Snippets — innovations that improve the network's “understanding”. So, we are opening the new year with the introduction of appropriate improvements based on these technologies. First, we add Google Squared - “highlight the answer”, and second, we expand the functionality of Rich Snippets, which now work with events.

Highlighting responses in search results

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Most of the information on the network is not structured. For example, in blogs, with the arrangement of content, no one follows simple rules. Each site with product reviews has its own format, rating system and classification. The computer is very difficult to perceive unstructured information, which means that people still have to put a lot of effort to analyze data.

Google Squared is one of our attempts to automatically identify and extract structured information across the web. We’ve made progress , and today Google Squared’s task is to make search better for everyone with the new answer selection feature.

Highlighting the answer helps you get information faster, highlighting in bold the possible answer to your question right in the search results. This feature is for fact-based search queries, such as [ John Lennon died ]. If the page returned as a result of your query contains a simple answer, the result will often contain the corresponding text in bold for easier orientation.

Consider an example - [ empire state height ]. Previously, the result looked like this:



With today's improvements, the answer - 1250 feet or 381 meters - will be highlighted in the search result:



This type of quick response only affects certain types of search queries. For example, the answer to [france history] cannot fit in a small piece of text. However, by analyzing your search queries, we will soon be able to expand the functionality of Google Squared. Illumination of answers will begin to work in the coming days in the English version of google.com.

Rich Snippets for Events

Sometimes the easiest way to understand someone is to talk. On the Internet is the same. We believe that the best way to “understand” a web page is to ask webmasters about their content. To this end, we continue to improve our search results with Rich Snippets , allowing webmasters to commenit web pages structuredly in a standard format.

While we started to improve the search results of reviews and people. When your search result contains a web page with a review, you can see the number of user reviews and their average rating for each search result. When your search result contains an open profile page of a social network of a person, you can see the location and profession or a list of his friends.

Today we are announcing support for a rich Rich Snippets format - events. The new option improves search results, including links to specific events and meetings, as well as their names, date and place. Here is an example of an event search from livenation.com:



The new result format provides a fast and convenient way to analyze pages with events, allowing you to view only what you are really interested in. If you participated in Hip Hop Karaoke, you can quickly find out where and when the next show in Irving Plaza and follow the link for more details. We work with several sites for a test run, but the implementation of the new markup will take a lot of time from webmasters. Follow our blog Webmaster Central .

This is a “quick translation”, about errors / inaccuracies / ugliness, please write to us .