Starting today, Google has announced that you’ll be seeing a new and improved sitelinks search box. This new search box is designed to make it easier for users to reach specific content on your site, directly through your own site-search pages.
Google points out that when When users search for a company by name they may really be searching for something specific to that company’s website. Previously, when Google’s algorithms detected this, they would display a larger set of sitelinks and an additional search box below that search result. That search box which let users do site: searches over the site straight from the results.
With the change that Google rolled out today, the sitelinks search box is now more prominent and placed above the sitelinks. The new search box also supports Autocomplete.
The new site links search box has the ability to send the user directly to your website’s own search pages, provided your pages are marked up correctly. Here’s how to markup your site in order to enable this feature.
You need to have a working site-specific search engine for your site. If you already have one, notify Google by marking up your homepage as a schema.org/WebSite entity with the potentialAction property of the schema.org/SearchAction markup. You can use JSON-LD, microdata, or RDFa to do this; check out the full implementation details on Google’s developer site.
If the markup is implemented correctly on your site, users will have the ability to jump directly from the sitelinks search box to your site’s search results page. If Google doesn’t detect any markup, users will be shown a Google search results page for the corresponding site: query, just as they have been doing up to this point.
