Google announced this week via the Google Research blog that they will be introducing a new addition to search listings. The new feature is designed to pull out key pieces of information from a page and insert it into the search results snippet for that page.
The new feature, which sounder like a richer version of rich snippets, is called structured snippets and can already be seen in certain searches.
If you search for Batman, as one does, you’ll now learn where he first appeared and who he was created by without having to click on the Wikipedia page. See the example of Google’s structured snippets below:
I couldn’t get structured snippets to appear for many other searches, but I get the impression we’ll see a lot more of them as time goes on.
Google explains the technical detailed behind Structured Snippets:
Structured Snippets is the latest collaboration between Google Research and the Web Search team employing that data to seamlessly provide the most relevant information to the user. 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.
Google adds that the quality of facts surfaced by structured snippets will vary according to page content. Google will continually enhance the relevance and accuracy of the facts being displayed.
