Several new improvements introduced to the Google search engine are likely to be useful for both web users and search engine marketing.
A post on the official Google blog, part of the regular ‘this week in search’ series, describes the new features. One of the more simple additions but useful from a search engine optimisation/search engine marketing viewpoint is the inclusion of menu information and opening times in local results for Google universal search. Now, if the words “hours” or “menu” are included in a search term then a properly optimised website for a restaurant will display opening hours or menu information in the local results section alongside the standard listings.
Another update, ‘Rich snippets for events’, also adds to the amount of useful information included in universal search results. ‘Rich snippets’ are brief annotations supplied by webmasters which summarise the landing page for users viewing information on a search results page, and are a useful way of drawing users to a suitable landing page. The new events format allows even information such as dates and location to be displayed alongside links to landing pages about these specific events. “As webmasters implement the new markup on their web pages you’ll begin to see these events more frequently” writes Johanna Wright, director of product management & search at Google.
The final improvement is less likely to be of interest from a search engine marketing perspective but seems to be a likely response to Bing’s incorporation of Wolfram-Alpha’s data handling technologies. Google’s ‘Answer highlighting’ feature “helps you get to information more quickly by delivering the likely answer to your question in boldface type right in search results. If the pages returned for these searches contain a simple answer to a factual-based search, the snippet will more often include the relevant text in boldface for easy reference”.
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