Google introduced two improvements (their words) to their search results pages last week. They describe these changes as:
More and better search refinements and Longer snippets
More and better search refinements basically helps you find what you’re looking for if you don’t find it on the first go by giving you a list of related searches, much like you might see on the Google Insights for Search site.
Of more interest to me are the longer snippets. Here, Google is increasing the length of the snippet returned in the search results from roughly two lines to roughly four lines of text, but only when you “ask” them a long question. The idea as far as I can tell is this: if you go to the bother of typing out a whole question (including a number of useful keywords) then Google wants to give you the answer as quick as possible, i.e. in the search results.
So, in theory, typing a medium length question with enough keywords in it will trigger this new kind of search result. I tried this:
does asking google a question now get you a longer set of snippets in the search results?
Sure enough, there are the longer snippets. It’ll be interesting to see where Google go with this. Right now, none of the pages that I’ve been to that have these longer snippets have any AdWords advertising on hem. However, it would seem that if Google feel they have enough information in the longer query to give the user the answer they’re looking for, then don’t they also have enough information for extremely targeted advertising? There may be a new type of AdWords product coming that would be linked to these types of query.
Also, by giving the user the answer in the snippet, are Google trying to compete with Wikipedia and other information-heavy sites? It would also seem like users would be less likely to click through to the page that the snippet was taken from. If that became the norm, it would change the way the web works overnight! Luckily for website owners, these longer snippets are only triggered by long search strings. With the vast majority of searches carried out being one, two or three words in length, there is no reason to worry, for now at least.
Interesting. How will this affect people’s Google ads revenue from their own sites if people no longer actually click through?
Good question. For now the number of queries this applies to will be so low I don’t think anyone will notice.
Remember as well, if that happened Google would lose their cut of any AdSense revenue on the destination site, so it’s not in their interest either, unless they have a way of making better money from the new style search results pages.