Google Introduces "Answer Highlighting" and "Rich Snippets for Events"
A new post on the Google Blog introduces two new features that will be rolling-out across Google.com in English during the next few days. The blog post has a few illustrations but in a nutshell, one of new features builds on the Google Squared technology that was introduced last year. According to the site, as of today, Google Squared itself, a part of Google Labs. Google Squared focuses on adding structure to unstructured web data.
So, how how's it going to be used?
Answer Highlighting helps you get to results more quickly by seeking out and bolding the likely answer to your question right in search results list. The feature is meant for searches with factual answers, such as [meet john doe director], [[john lennon died], or [what was the political party of president ford]. If the pages returned for these queries contain a simple answer, the search snippet will more often include the relevant text and bold it for easy reference.
Of course, info pros (especially school librarians) need to remind people that even if the answer comes via this new service, Google is not the source of the information. Also, it's important to make sure users where the info is coming from and in some cases how current it is.
The other new feature introduced today are "Rich Snippets for Events." It's primarily for webmasters who have been working with Google's Rich Snippets since May, 2009. "Snippets" allow webmasters to add structured data in a standard format to web pages.
Today, we're announcing support for a new Rich Snippets format for events. The new format improves search results by including links to specific event names, dates and locations. Here's an example of a new event result from livenation.com if you search for
The new result format provides a fast and convenient way to identify pages with events and click directly to the ones you find interesting. If you're into Hip Hop Karaoke, you can quickly find out when and where the next show is in Irving Plaza, and click for more info. We've been working with a few sites to ramp them up for our initial launch, but it will take time for other webmasters to start implementing the new markup.
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