Google announced a new kind of snippets it will be showing on search results pages now. These snippets will appear on results for sites that are list pages.
“Snippets—the few lines of text that appear under every search result—are designed to give you a sense for what’s on the page and why it’s relevant to your query,” says product manager Raj Krishnan. “This week we started rolling out snippet improvements for pages that contain lists; results for these pages will now reflect the structure of the page, rather than just showing two lines of text.”
“If a search result consists mostly of a structured list, like a table or series of bullets, we’ll show a list of three relevant rows or items underneath the result in a bulleted format,” he adds. “The snippet will also show an approximate count of the total number of rows or items on the page (for example, “30+ items” in the screenshot below).”
Google says it will be rolling out the snippets globally over the next few days.
This is the second type of new snippet we’ve seen Google launch in the last week or so. They recently announced the launch of rich snippets for music, allowing webmeisters to markup pages using the music markup to allow search results to display song info in the snippet.
The feature launched with MySpace, Rhapsody and Reverbnation taking advantage.
Google says it will continue to improve snippets in different ways.
