Original Article: Today at Google’s Searchology event, the company announced (among other things) that it was rolling out richer snippets. The snippets will extract and show more useful info from results than the current ones, Google says.

"For example, if you are thinking of trying out a new restaurant and are searching for reviews, rich snippets could include things like the average review score, the number of reviews, and the restaurant’s price range," says a joint post to the Google Blog from Marissa Mayer and Jack Menzel.

They explain that Google can do not this on their own. It us up to webmasters to contribute to this. "We hope that web publishers will help us by adopting microformats and RDFa standards to mark up their HTML and bring this structured data to the surface," they say. "This will help people better understand the information you have on your page so they can spend more time there and less on Google."

That is one theory. Another would be that users would get all the info they need right from the SERP and have no reason to click through to the actual site. This would certainly depend on the individual result, and the information that accompanied it as well as the user’s intent. It’s just something for publishers to consider. How much information do you want to give away before the click?

The richer snippets will be rolled out gradually. Those who are interested in getting participating in this can read up at the rich snippets help page Google has set up.

- Search Options
- Google Squared
- Richer Snippets
- Android Sky Map Application

Google’s Matt Cutts pulled some other interesting things from the event that some may have overlooked amidst the whirlwind of Google news. "I noticed several tidbits that I don’t think we’ve ever said in public before," says Cutts.

First he mentions Google’s internal code names for spell-check features. These include the normal "Did you mean:" spell check link at the top of the results, but also the mid-page suggestions (codename: Chameleon):

And the more aggressive Spellmeleon, which includes a couple results for the corrected query. Cutts says this is for when Google really thinks the user messed up. He also notes that this feature is a tremendous help for is webspam team because it pretty much eliminates the chances of users going on to results that spammers have targeted for typos.

Other things Cutts pulled out of Searchology include:

- mobile search results are blended between results from the mobile web and results from the regular web.

- 1 in 4 searches triggers a universal/blended search result

- 40% of searches on any given day are repeat searches for that user (a reason that SearchWiki can be useful)

- Links to Jayant Madhavan’s paper on what Google is doing to crawl the deep web

- Also links to each slide from the event

The event was a big one for Google and Google enthusiasts in terms of items of interest. Google rolls out some new product or feature to a product nearly every day, but at Searchology we got a bunch of stuff to think about.

What will they think of next?

A post on the Google Mobile Blog talks a little bit about how this app came to fruition. Orbiting Software Engineer Kevin Serafini shows us a "prototype" consisting of a phone, a compass, a level, and a map. This is how others were convinced to get on board for the app’s development.

"We were able to play around with a T-Mobile G1 test device in the office and were intrigued by all of the sensors that were available," explains Serafini. "The GPS and clock allowed us to generate maps for the exact time and location, but the compass and accelerometer were what made Sky Map truly interesting. Using these two sensors, the app can determine the exact direction that your phone is facing and display the stars that are visible. If you want to identify that bright star in the west, all you have to do is point the device in that direction and you’ll see ‘Venus’ appear on your screen."

"Because we do work for Google, it was perfectly natural for us to add a search feature," he adds.

To use the search feature, just enter the name of an object of interest (like Saturn as used in this example) and the phone will display an arrow pointing to it. The arrow will actually change from blue to red, the closer you get to it.

Attendees of the Searchology event were directed to find the constellation Orion, apparently the favorite of Google’s Marissa Mayer. An engineer reportedly told the crowd, "This is an Android phone, so it can do more."

From the sound of it, you can search for something and receive a list of info that relates to that query.

Danny Sullivan liveblogging the event says they showed a "search for ‘small dogs’ and results are listed in rows and columns, things like Jack Russell Terrier, its weight, type of dog group, and under it a Maltese." He shows some screenshots from the presentation, but they’re hard to make anything out.

"What if Google gets the ‘messy’ data from the web wrong? Hover over a cell, and you’ll see the source with more info and the other sources for that value. You can also edit the information and save to your own personal account," writes Sullivan.

According to Claudine Beaumont with Telegraph.co.uk, this will be rolled out across the whole search engine at some point. "Unlike Wolfram Alpha, it scans the entire web, rather than just a database, for its results," she says.

She points to an example of a search for "London boroughs," which would list all boroughs alphabetically, along with relevant links and info about populations and that kind of thing.

Results will be organized in lists, but users will be able to remove information they don’t want to see. You can evidently also add different columns.

The feature is supposed to be launched within the next several weeks, so be on the look out for that. At that point, we can get a better sense of what all you can do with it. Look for at at google.com/squared when it goes live. In the meantime, you can still play around with the new "show options" feature in Google search results.

One of the highlights of the event was Marissa Mayer introducing some changes to Google’s search results. This is called "Search Options," and allows users to "slice" and "dice" results in a number of ways.

Now when you perform a search on Google, you will see a link under the search box that says "show options." Clicking this will bring up a left-side navigation menu allowing you to check out results for video, forums, and reviews, and view them from "any time," "recent results," "the past 24 hours," "the past week," and the "past year."

The option to sort by date or relevance is there, similar to how Google News has let you organize your results in the past. There are options for "standard results," "images from the page," and "more text."

There is also the option to switch between standard view, related searches, the "wonder wheel," and a timeline. The wonder wheel is particularly interesting. It gives you different links related to your query. Look at this one for "Chinatown:"

This is certainly the next step from Google for personalized search. We’ve all been anticipating the addition of more personalization features, and this fits that bill. We saw the launch of SearchWiki late last year. Combine that with this, and users have the ability to manipulate their search results on Google more than ever before.

I had to turn down the invitation because of other commitments, but we sent Enquiro’s Director of Technology and analytics blogger, Manoj Jasra down in my stead.

Sure enough, just after noon yesterday, I received a press release announcing the introduction of universal search. I haven’t had a chance to talk to Manoj about what else Google may have unveiled in Mountain View yesterday, but even just working my way through the official release from Google gave me plenty of food for thought. For the extensive list of the announcements and some running commentary, check out Danny’s post on Searchengineland.

To me, the one thing that jumps out in this is the announcement of Universal Search. Basically, Universal Search is the breaking down of the information silos that currently exist on Google and blending them into a single set of results. The changes right now are very subtle. Web results still dominate the typical results page and the primary thing that would be noticeable by the user are additional dynamically generated navigation links that sit just about the results.

The key to universal search results is an on-the-fly algorithm that looks across all of Google’s information sources and prioritizes and ranks all the items coming from these disparate sources based on the user intent. Now, it’s in those last five words, "based on the user intent" that the really important piece of this comes out. Just a few weeks ago, I interviewed Marissa Mayer about the inclusion of Web history in the dataset to calculate personalized search results. This just gives Sep Kamvar and his personalization algorithm a lot more to chew on as they determine user intent. During the interview, I asked Marissa Mayer if personalization allows Google to be more confident in delivering vertical results. Marissa indicated that this was not an area they were currently looking at.

There are a lot of different things that we could do with this data. I’ll be totally honest. Verticals isn’t something that has been first and foremost in our minds so I don’t really think there’s a strong vertical angle here at the moment.

To me it just didn’t make sense. Couple that with yesterday’s announcement of Universal search results and I’ve got to conclude that Marissa was throwing up a smokescreen.

Personalized search is the engine is going to drive universal search. The two are inextricably linked. When you look at the wording the Google throws around about the on-the-fly ranking of content from all the sources for Universal Search, that’s exactly the same the wording they use for the personalization algorithm. It operates on-the-fly, looks at the content in the Google index and re-ranks it according to be perceived intent of the user, based on search history, Web history and other signals. It’s not a huge stretch to extend that same real-time categorization of content across all of Google’s information silos. That is, in fact, what Google’s announcement yesterday said. Call it a silo, call it a vertical, the end result is the same. As Google gains more confidence in disambiguating user intent, more specific types of search results, extending beyond Web results, will get included on the results page and presented to the user.

This introduces something else that opens up some interesting implications for Google. And again, if they choose to go down this path, it flies in the face of something that Marissa Mayer has previously stated. On the search results page as we know it, display or other types of advertising just don’t work that well. The search results pages is heavily text-based. We look for text, we respond to text, we click on text. Anything that’s not text acts as an interruption and distraction. There’s no place on this page for display or rich media advertising.

But if you mix up the search results page and start including things like images, video clips, maps, icons for audio files, you move away from the common paradigm of the text based search results page. The Google page becomes much more like a personalized, on-the-fly portal based around the intent of our query. As such, it includes stimuli from a lot of different sources, presented in a lot of different ways. There will be many things fighting for your attention. And in this paradigm, perhaps display and rich media advertising works better. In another announcement from Google, Marissa Mayer appears to have backtracked and open the door for this.

Yesterday, Marissa responded to a question about possible inclusion of non text-based ads in this way:

Well we don’t have anything to announce on that today. I do think this opens the door for the introduction of richer media into the search results page. We are now going to understand how users interact with that. And as Alan always likes to say search is about finding the best answer, not just the best URL or the best textual snippet.

For us ads are answers as well. Searching ads is just as hard as searching the Web, as searching images. And so I was hoping that we could bring some of these same advances in terms of the richness of media to ads.

Greg Sterling, in his post on Search Engine Land, calls it something of a bombshell (Greg, I’m now regreting that I didn’t attend, as I would have loved to chat to you about this) and I agree. This is a significant retraction of Google’s long running stand on keeping display ads off the SERP:

There will be no banner ads on the Google homepage or web search results pages. There will not be crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever.

Google said in their announcements that the changes for the user will be subtle at first. In fact, the position of the dynamically generated navigation links that appear about the search results will largely be ignored by most users. They won’t even know they exist. But in typical Google fashion, this tentative presentation of new functionality will be an incremental one. The typical path that Google takes when introducing new functionality is

• subtly introduce new navigation options in the way of links that tend to be out of the primary scan path
• make it an opt in experience for the user
• gradually roll this functionality into a default opt in
• eventually integrate more fully into the standard presentation of results
• move to full integration and remove the ability for the user to opt out

if Google goes down this path with both universal and personal search, you can expect to see a substantially different look for search results in the near future. And as with most things we’ve talked about that Google is looking at introducing, there will be a trade-off between overall functionality for most users and a relinquishing of control for a small number of users.

My final point for this post is the speed of which Google is introducing new search innovations. A few weeks ago I posted that Google may be treating search as the forgotten child, devoting more attention to the sexier new channels they were acquiring, including pretty much everything under the sun. Matt Cutts was quick to post a comment saying that Google was still very much involved with search and that there would be a number of new things rolling out in the near future. It appears that I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about and now have to eat my words, as the announcements over the last few weeks have indicated that Google is still very much in the search game and is moving forward at, what for them, is breakneck pace.

I’ve often stated before the Google was the victim of their own success. Because they have such a large slice search market, any changes to the actual presentation of the search pages came with a lot of risk. It’s a major monetization channel for them, their biggest one by far, and any changes in user experience through the introduction of new functionality comes with the potential of dramatically reducing click through on sponsored ads. I predicted that this would make it tough for Google to really innovate with search and we would probably be looking to the smaller players to aggressively pursue innovation. Interestingly, much of my recent conversation with Ask’s usability team lead, Michael Ferguson, revolved around this point. That interview will be running tomorrow on Search Engine Land, with full transcript posted to this blog. If you look at what Ask is been doing with AskX:

It’s very similar to what Google says they will be doing with universal search results. It’s taking content from a number of different sources and rolling it into one combined search results page. It came as a complete surprise to me when I read the release indicating that Google is moving aggressively down the same path. Google will not be taking the path that Ask is, by aggressively presenting new functionality on their main site, Google will introduce it incrementally, bit by bit. But expect the evolution of the search experience on Google to move fairly quickly.

All of Google’s announcements in the last few months point in the same direction. They all point to a highly personalized, highly relevant portal to all of Google’s information. Here’s my other prediction. While Marissa was very careful in past interviews to state that personalization is currently impacting only the organic search results, with no work being done on the personalized presentation of sponsored content, I smell another smokescreen. Personalized presentation of advertising content is just too huge a revenue opportunity for Google and we’ll be seeing it in the very near future.

Comments

I will start with the most important news items first. Udi Manber, VP of Engineering, said that 20-25% of search queries each day are new, that’s an amazing fact – I didn’t realize how fast the world was generating new content and news. He also announced that Google will be launching a new search feature which will allow users to translate search results into another language on the fly, talk about making the content on the internet even more accessible.

VP of Search Products, Marissa Mayer created even more buzz (which now is old news) by announcing the launch of 3 new additions to the Google Search Experience plus one new Google Service:

1) Universal Search – The integration of results from other Google Search Silos such as Video, News, Books and Images into the regular Google Search Results. Marissa launched the query "Steve Jobs" and the results (in addition to text listings) showed Images of Steve Jobs, a video of one of Steve Jobs’ presentations as well as related news items.

2) Contextual search navigation options – After launching a search query users will now see other search options underneath the query text box. These search options are the most relative searches options based on the user’s query. See image below.

3) Universal Navigation Bar - Google also added a new top navigation bar which contains links to other Google’s services (which are now just a click away). This top nav will appear on services such as Gmail as well. See image below.

4) Google Experimental – http://www.google.com/experimental – Shows the latest "experiments" that Google is working on, users can sign up for experiments which integrates the experiment into the user’s search experience. Users will be given the ability to provide feedback to Google as well.

Software Engineer Ben Gomes talked about PageRank:

Kerry Rodden talked about usability testing:

and the various Google search products were also discussed.

Danny lists links to live blogging of the event from TechCrunch and AppScout.

While there were hints by a few blogs that have been talking about Searchology day that an announcement of some sort would be made, my “in and out” viewing of the web cast did not catch anything in particular. However, if something of note was presented, I’m sure Search Engine Land will cover it.

Comments