Mar 25 2009
Google Makes Two New Improvements to the Search Results Pages
This week Google announced two improvements to the organic search results listings.
They are:
- Expanded list of useful related searches
- The addition of longer search result descriptions
The expanded list of useful related searches is at the bottom of the search pages where it gives you suggestions of other searches. Since Yahoo offers it at the top of the page, Google offers the information at the bottom. I guess they figure you have looked through all the listings and did not find what you want, so you might want to try these. This is also good information when you are doing keyword research for website content or blog posts. The example they give is if you search “principles of physics” the Google algorithms understand that “angular momentum”, “special relativity” etc. are related terms that may offer more information. Try it and see what you get.
The second is the addition of longer search result descriptions in the SERPS (Search Engine Ranking Pages). This is interesting, in the code for a web page there are meta tags where a website developer can add descriptions and titles for each page on a website. Now it looks like Google will grab more of that information and list it on the SERP pages. This is for searches with more than three words. This allows the descriptions to give back more information on what you are looking for exactly. I also noticed that some listings may have two lines where others would have four. As people get smarter and more definitive in their searches they will receive better results. This is an opportunity to add more keywords in your web page description.
You may read more about both of these improvements in The Official Google Blog.
