CNN]
Google usually shows a green web address, or URL, at the bottom of each search
result to let you know where you're headed. Today we're rolling out an
improvement that replaces the URL in some search results with a hierarchy
showing the precise location of the page on the website. The new display
provides valuable context and new navigation options. The changes are rolling
out now and should be available globally in the next few days.Some web addresses
help you understand the structure of the site and how the specific page fits
into the site hierarchy. For example, consider a search for the biography of
Vint Cerf (Google's Internet Evangelist). The URL for one result,
"www.google.com/corporate/execs.html," shows that the page is located in a page
about "execs," under "corporate," which is on the "google.com" site. This can
provide valuable context when deciding whether to click on the result.Often,
however, URLs are too long, too short, or too obscure to add useful information.
For example, consider this result from ProductWiki for the query [spidersapien
reviews]:The URL of this result is "www.productwiki.com/spidersapien," which
doesn't provide much additional information about the site or this result. Now
take a look at the result with the new site hierarchy display:The new text
provides useful information about the page. You can tell that the ProductWiki
site has information about many different products, organized in different
categories, and you can even tell that Spidersapien is a robot toy. In addition,
each phrase in the green line is actually a link. For example, clicking on "Toys
& Games" takes you to ProductWiki's listing page for all toys, and clicking on
"Robots" takes you to a list of their robot toys. This way if you realize that
you're interested in a more general category than this specific product (there
are a lot of cool robot toys out there) you can easily access information on
broader topics.The host and domain for the site (in this case
www.productwiki.com) will always be shown, so you always know what website
you're going to before you click. There's not always enough room to show the
complete hierarchy, so sometimes we use ellipses to replace some of the
intermediate levels, like in this result for [how to make granola]:The
information in these new hierarchies come from analyzing destination web pages.
For example, if you visit the ProductWiki Spidersapien page, you'll see a series
of similar links at the top, "Home> Toys & Games> Robots." These are standard
navigational tools used throughout the web called "breadcrumbs," which
webmasters frequently show on their sites to help users navigate. By analyzing
site breadcrumbs, we've been able to improve the search snippet for a small
percentage of search results, and we hope to expand in the future.When we design
the way results appear on google.com, our goal is to get you to the information
you're looking for as quickly as possible. Sometimes that means improving how we
represent websites, and other times that means giving you new ways to explore
content. We're always happy when we can introduce a feature, like site
hierarchies, that does both!Posted by Harvey Jones and Daniel Rocha, Software
Engineers, Result UI Team
http://news.by-expert.com/new-site-hierarchies-display-in-search-results/
0 comments:
Post a Comment