In a bid to make search results more relevant, Google is introducing two new features which were actually based from two of its experiemental products – Google Squared and Rich Snippets. These two new features are – highlighting of answers in search results and Rich Snippets for events.
Answer highlighting allows users to get the information they need quickly just by bolding out the likely answers to their questions for search results with factual answers. What Google’s search snippets does is to bold or highlight relevant text on the search result containing simple answers to simple factual search queries. This would give users an idea whether they should click on the link provided on the search results based on whether the higlighted text really answers their queries.
The other new feature introduced by Google has something to do with Rich Snippets. This has more to do with webmasters providing their web pages with structured data through annotated standard format.
So far, Rich Snippets include more detailed information when search results contains reviews and people. Now these Rich Snippets would also contain structured data with links to specific events – their names, dates and locations.
Like the answer highlighting feature, Rich Snippets for event also aims to help users determine which particular link in the search results is worthy of their clicks by identifying the correct events that users are actually looking for.
Of course to make Rich Snippets for events work, this has to start from webmasters’ end. Webmasters must properly mark up their site content to identify Rich Snippets for events. The Google Webmaster blog has some information on how to go about this.
