14 DAY TRIAL // A search engine's job is to let users find the information they are looking for as fast and as easy as possible. One way of doing this is, obviously, by providing them with the most relevant results and remove as many steps as possible between typing the query and landing on the wanted page. This is what Google strives for and why it puts so much effort in the swiftness of the search page. But there's another way of getting people to the info they want by providing the relevant information within the search results. One way Google does this is with Rich Snippets but now it's adding a new feature, "Answers Highlights," which replaces the usual text snippets in the results with the 'answer' to any factual query.
"Most information on the web is unstructured... Unstructured data is difficult for a computer to interpret, which means that we humans still have to do a fair amount of work to synthesize and understand information on the web," Kavi Goel and Noah Weiss, Product Managers at Google wrote.
"Google Squared is one of our early efforts to automatically identify and extract structured data from across the Internet. We've been making progress, and today the research behind Google Squared is, for the first time, making search better for everyone with a new feature called 'answer highlighting'."
Google Squared is an effort to make sense of all the information scattered throughout the web and present it to the user in a structured fashion. There is a Google Labs page set up to check out how the project is coming along but the most important part of the work is done on the underlying algorithms. Now, the results of that work are making their way into the main search engine.
A lot of times a query is done to retrieve a small piece of information but this usually means going through the search engine and then scanning through the web pages in the results to find it. For these queries, Google now tries to surface the relevant piece of information within the search results.
For example, a search for "empire state height" would retrieve the Wikipedia entry for the Empire State Building as the first result but to see the actual height, you still have to visit Wikipedia. When the new changes are implemented, Google says the feature is being rolled out over the weekend, the text snippet for the Wikipedia page will feature the actual height. Interestingly, searching for "empire state building height" will retrieve the actual answer on top of any regular search results.
The company is also rolling out another new feature expanding the use of the Rich Snippets, the pieces of information which are included in the search results. Now, with support from webmasters that will implement the feature, Google search results will contain events info complementing the review and people Rich Snippets. You can find out how to implement support for the feature on your site here.
