This week, the Google Research team introduced a new addition to Google Web Search called structured snippets, which provide an additional way for Google to pull data from your website and display it among their search results.
From the blog post:
“Google Web Search has evolved in recent years with a host of features powered by the Knowledge Graph and other data sources to provide users with highly structured and relevant data. Structured Snippets is a new feature that incorporates facts into individual result snippets in Web Search.”
You can look at the new structured snippets example shown above yourself by clicking on the results for the nikon d7100 search here. These data pieces are tagged onto the bottom of the original text of the snippet and are not hyperlinked.
“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.”
There could be an interesting outcome due to these new snippets, however. Just like Google’s Knowledge Graph “cards” – the results that attempt to answer the query of a searcher without having to click through to a site – these new structured snippets pose additional questions for webmasters and marketers: Will they decrease click-through rates, will they improve the user experience, or both?