Faster Access to Relevant Info: Google Enhances Search Snippets
In an effort to help you find the info you need in a fast and relevant manner, Google display a few lines of text underneath all the search results. For those of you who are not familiar with how Google does things, or how the Mountain View-based company calls its products, this is a search snippet. The snippet’s functionality has been enhanced recently; it is now capable of helping your reach the information you need, faster.
“We’ve enhanced the search snippet with two new features that make it easier to find information buried deep within a page. Normally, a search snippet shows how a page, as a whole, relates to your query by excerpting content that appears near and around where your query terms show on the page. But what if only one section of the page is relevant to your search? That's where these new features can help, by providing links within the snippet to relevant sections of the page, making it faster and easier to find what you're looking for,” explained Chris Kern, Snippets Team.
Let’s take a look at an example in order to understand this better. Let’s say you want to use Google to look for information about trans fats and cholesterol. You type in “trans fats”, hit Search and you are presented with a list of search results, including one from Wikipedia. Within the snippet for the Wikipedia page about trans fats there are links to specific sections within the page, including one for “Nutritional guidelines” – this link is of interest to you, assuming of course that you’re doing all this online research because you want to stay healthy and you want to see which foods are good for you and which are not.
Now let’s assume you want to find out more about cholesterol, good cholesterol in particular. You want to find out what levels of hood cholesterol are within the healthy range, so you search for “good cholesterol level”. Amongst the top search results there’s one from the American Heart Association – within the snippet you will notice a link to Your HDL (good) cholesterol level. Just click it and you will jump to that specific section of the American Heart Association website.
“We’ve enhanced the search snippet with two new features that make it easier to find information buried deep within a page. Normally, a search snippet shows how a page, as a whole, relates to your query by excerpting content that appears near and around where your query terms show on the page. But what if only one section of the page is relevant to your search? That's where these new features can help, by providing links within the snippet to relevant sections of the page, making it faster and easier to find what you're looking for,” explained Chris Kern, Snippets Team.
Let’s take a look at an example in order to understand this better. Let’s say you want to use Google to look for information about trans fats and cholesterol. You type in “trans fats”, hit Search and you are presented with a list of search results, including one from Wikipedia. Within the snippet for the Wikipedia page about trans fats there are links to specific sections within the page, including one for “Nutritional guidelines” – this link is of interest to you, assuming of course that you’re doing all this online research because you want to stay healthy and you want to see which foods are good for you and which are not.
Now let’s assume you want to find out more about cholesterol, good cholesterol in particular. You want to find out what levels of hood cholesterol are within the healthy range, so you search for “good cholesterol level”. Amongst the top search results there’s one from the American Heart Association – within the snippet you will notice a link to Your HDL (good) cholesterol level. Just click it and you will jump to that specific section of the American Heart Association website.
