Within the Search World it seems that not a day goes by without Google announcing something new or the latest change to the way search results are delivered.
This as you can imagine can be quite challenging for digital marketing professionals in Dorset. Keeping abreast of everything means planning a ‘reading period’ into your normally busy schedule.
According to the Google Blog this detail to the snippet is designed to provide users extra ‘useful’ information that Google itself deems relevant.
Here is what Google had to say in their blog;
“Structured Snippets is the latest collaboration between Google Research and the Web Search team employing that data to seamlessly provide the most relevant information to the user. We use machine learning techniques to distinguish data tables on the Web from uninteresting tables, e.g., tables used for formatting web pages. We also have additional algorithms to determine quality and relevance that we use to display up to four highly ranked facts from those data tables”.
Normally we prefer to test these results for ourselves. However, at present we haven’t been able to discover anything more useful than superheroes. Here are a few examples, try typing Hulk or Batman;


As you can see from the Highlighted boxes Google has drawn extra information from the page, that, interestingly has not been highlighted as important. There is no extra snippet code that differentiates this from other facts on the page.
Google is combining a few algorithms to deliver these results. The first is checking for specific tabular results. This will be different from the normal tables that might control normal day-to-day page layout. The second, it determine quality and relevance.
Whilst Google is drawing these facts from within normal tables, it is important to remember that Schema markup can help Google display this extra information and can give users more reasons enticements to click on specific search results.
Another interesting and perhaps more relevant example is from the DPReview.com website.

Type Nikon D7100 into Google and you should see the above results. This snippet pulls extra information about the camera into the search results.
This is obviously early days and how far these new algorithm extends into ‘normal’ searches remains to be seen. I say normal results – It’s one thing using Wiki-pedia as your control group, it’s quite another using the rest of the web. Let me know what you think.