If you’ve conducted a simple search within Google lately – which, let’s face it, you probably have – you may have noticed a new and different variety of result type. This type of result, one that has been labeled as “One Box”, “Snippets” or “Short Answers,” is becoming more persistent within the engine. And no matter what Google decides to officially name these types of quick results, you can expect to see more of them in the future.
Whether you want to calculate a simple math equation or solve measurement conversions, Google is streamlining your answers. For example, if you have air travel plans, you can search Google for your airline flight status. If you are interested in music, you can query your favorite music artists or songs. You can also search for new movie showings or times, and dates of birth or death. Given the volume of these one-off searches, Google is aiming to increase user satisfaction by speeding up its delivery of the basic information we seek.
Where does the data come from?
Google pulls much of this data from data partnerships or its extended handling of Google Squared technology. Though some of the answers come from direct partnerships – such as flight info with FlightStatus.com or music information from Pandora – others will come from leveraging and cross-referencing trusted sources, as well as utilizing structured data analysis, to confidently return direct answers that supersede traditional web results.
For online brands or marketers, this is yet another reason why many of the most lucrative top positions are becoming harder to achieve in natural search. However, it’s hard to dispute that these answers won’t be extremely helpful for Google users looking for fast information. That said, marketers have very little or no control when it comes to influencing these short answers snippets — something that might encourage the use of AdWords features such as “position preference.” While securing these top paid positions is generally a function of being reviewed, approved relevant and having a high CTR, this preference explicitly tells AdWords to only to run your ad if it will end up in specific positions.
How Marketers Can Leverage Structured Data
The future of the Web is HTML5, and part of HTML5 is increasingly structured data. The use of structured data is nothing new at Google, as Google announced Rich Snippets in May 2009. While different than the aforementioned examples, Google Rich Snippets work off structured data already embedded into a brand’s web pages, enabling Google to display of enhanced information within its search results. Google does this by looking for microdata, microformats or RDFa within a website’s HTML.
Yahoo also embraces structured data for results through their own Search Monkey standards. Both Yahoo and Google programs evaluate RDFa markup, the official structured data format of HTML5. Finally, other Google partnerships including those with Bazaarvoice, allow marketers to expose user reviews, by integrating this data to accompany Google’s search results. Of course, a brand must have confidence in their product or services to render this type of user-generated feedback.
Google Example:
Yahoo Example:
Below are examples of various information types that can be packaged into these portable data formats via HTML web pages:
Conclusion
Since Universal Search was introduced just over three years ago, Google’s delivery of specialized results at the top, based on a user’s language or “intent,” has simply continued. Google local & map results are the most visible evidence in the Universal algorithm, but this just continues the trend. If results for your search can be pulled from an explicit data source, Google wishes to do so.
With the advent of microdata, in the form of microformats and the official HTML5 RDFa, the task is becoming much more achievable by Google, even to the point of cross-referencing the metadata of multiple sites to produce the single best answer. Achieving that top position on your keywords has become a bit harder to achieve – and at the same time, there is even less incentive for users to go beyond page one of results, or even scroll down.
Search engines will continually aim to improve speed and quality of results, something inevitably reliant on leveraging better data sources in a more efficient manner. Through structured data exchange, feeds or microdata in HTML, marketers might start to appraise an upside of coding their pages accordingly.
Even if you are marking up you pages, Google will not guarantee these enhanced results, but they do offer a testing tool to ensure your data can be extracted correctly. Plus, Google provides a web form to let them know you are marking up your content for rich snippets and interested in the program. This will only improve the chances of your rich data become displayed in the search results!
It’s still unclear how much impact the implementation of “Rich Snippets” or RDFa might yield, brands should notice a growing trend of structured data formats, enabling their content to be more accessible and standardized for open channels. Marking up HTML pages to provide this extended relevance and portability will no doubt grow in importance. A price is a price and a rating is a rating. Pages should no longer be treated as a page of a marketing brochure, or even as an Ajax-application, but rather as an opportunity to tell Google and other engines precisely what you mean.
HTML data formats are a tough road to walk. Microformats have been partially usurped by RDFa, which is now beginning to fall out of favor to HTML5 Microdata (not the same as RDFa).
The solution? Use all three at the same time. Thankfully, they are all different enough to do just that without creating a technology train wreck.
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