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Google Experiments with Showing Additional Information for Forums

An extended snippet is expected to come online

By Traian Teglet, Technology News Editor

27th of May 2008, 08:02 GMT

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The extended snippet shows forum-related information

Google plans to improve the quality of its search results and is currently experimenting with showing more information on forum threads. News about the search results feature comes approximately one month after the Mountain View company announced that its search engine would display the publishing date on a Web Page.

Users can't really enjoy the new feature just yet, as it is still in its

experimental stage. But when the feature is brought online, users will benefit from an extensive search results experience. Imagine you can find information on the discussion forum, the number of posts, the number of authors and the date of the first post directly from the Google search results page. That is, if what you are searching for is included in a forum indexed by Google.

This extended snippet can provide users with a helpful tool for categorizing the search results on their level of importance. A forum thread that has a single post or author will obviously not be so useful. The extended snippet for discussion boards isn't the only thing Google is experimenting on in order to improve their search results page. Other search results include special metadata, which take into consideration video and books search.

Whenever a user searches for an artist or a topic that has a highly rated video, it will be displayed in a thumbnail on the search results page. With Google Books, the search results include the author, the published date, a significant category and the number of pages. This recent experiment is just another way in which Google is trying to improve on the quality of its search results.

We are to expect other similar features to be brought to Google's search engine. For instance, extended snippets for blogs, news sites, shopping sites, scholar papers and even a way to restrict the results to a certain category will all be available.

TAGS:

google | search results | search engine | forum

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