Understanding the web to make search more relevant
Last year at our second Searchology event, we announced Google Squared and Rich Snippets, two approaches to improve search by better understanding the web. Today, we're kicking off the new year with two improvements based on those technologies.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google has used its Searchology events as the stage for structural relevance bets since the first Searchology Day recap in May 2007, and Google Squared and Rich Snippets were both unveiled at the second such event last year. In September 2009 it took an interim step toward answer-shaped results by adding in-snippet jump links that let searchers skip straight to a section of the target page.
This post is the next rung on that ladder: rather than sending users elsewhere to find facts, Google now extracts and highlights the answer itself on the results page, applying the Squared/Rich Snippets technology stack to everyday factual queries. ReadWriteWeb's same-day pickup under the headline 'Google Search Just Got a Little Bit Smarter' shows the story landed squarely in the search-watcher community that tracks these incremental shifts.
First-order effects
- For searchers, factual queries begin returning a highlighted answer directly in the snippet, shortening the path from query to fact without a click through to a source site.
- For Google, two technologies announced at Searchology 2009 move from experiments to shipped features, validating the event-to-production pipeline it set up in 2007.
Second-order effects
- Publishers and SEO practitioners face a new trade-off: content structured so machines can extract answers may win prominent snippet placement while surrendering the click that previously followed it.
- Rivals in the search market — Microsoft's Bing chief among them at this date — are pushed to match answer-highlighting presentation or concede that Google's index understands page content more granularly.
Third-order effects
- If extraction-on-the-serp becomes the norm, the economics of informational publishing tilt further toward whoever owns the results page, with sites competing to be cited inside Google's interface rather than visited from it.
- The pattern points toward search engines as answer engines: ranking links remains the substrate, but the product differentiator shifts to how much of the web's factual content the engine can parse and surface itself.
The trend: Search is steadily migrating from a list of ranked links toward machine-extracted answers presented on the results page, with each snippet feature pulling publisher value closer to Google's own interface.