These are becoming more and more comprehensive (or confusing, depending on how you look at it), including featured snippets, user questions, types and results cards, the AMP symbol, and the very possible symbol that is rumored to be used to mark websites that meet their Core Web Vitals.
This time we want to talk about the latest changes introduced on February 1, 2021 regarding Google Search Results, when Google itself announced a new feature within its results page.
This time, Google has begun to introduce a new feature that allows any user who performs a search to expand the information on a specific result in order to obtain more context about it and its source.
According to the press release published by Google on its official blog , the main reason behind this update is to allow anyone, faced with a search result from an unknown source, to decide, without having to visit the site, whether that source is relevant enough for their search and thus be able to find the information they are looking for without having to enter or perform an additional search.
In its concept, this new self employed phone number list feature can be very useful for queries, for example, of a medical or health nature, where the user can find out, with a simple click, whether the information comes from official or reliable sources, such as a quality medical journal.
Where does Google get the information for the About this result module ?
As is traditional for the search engine, the information that will appear in this section will be automatically extracted mainly from Wikipedia, provided that it is available within the collaborative encyclopedia.
This practice is something that Google already does for the Knowledge Panel or Knowledge Graph module, where the search engine uses the right-hand side space in the search results to show a fairly complete and immediate extract of information for a wide variety of searches: famous people, books, movies, sports, famous companies, etc.
It is curious that, even though the search engine itself recommends that webmasters avoid using automatically generated content , they themselves use it as a resource constantly.
Their justification for this is based on the fact that this information comes from open source sources and that they do so with the best interests of the user in mind, an inconsistency that could give rise to discussion and we will see how it develops in the future.
This raises an obvious question: What happens if there is no reference to the source within Wikipedia? In such cases, Google mentions that it will only show “additional context that may be available” and explicitly refers to the date of first indexing of the source in its index.
In this way, users will be able to know at least the age of a website in case there is no other data available; information that, despite being scarce, can be very useful in certain situations. An example of this is the current panorama, marked by an “era of misinformation”, where the creation and birth of “fake news” sites is carried out very intensively, generating distrust on the part of users.
In addition to this basic descriptive data, Google will also include in this section whether the source has a secure connection (if it uses the HTTPS protocol), encrypting the browsing data exchanged between each website and the browser.
Finally, Google mentions in its press release that, in the case of information that the search engine itself displays already grouped and extracted from other sources (for example, the job offers module), in this new section a description of how Google has obtained that information will appear.
How and where does this new Google Search Result appear ?
For the moment, this new section has been published both in the web search engine (desktop and mobile), as well as in the Google application for Android, although it is only active for searches in English within the USA.
The module is still in beta testing, so as Google gathers data on its use and operation, we will be able to learn more about this feature and find out if it will ultimately be rolled out globally or if it will be scrapped. In the meantime, we can test its operation using a VPN and the google.com search engine in English.
To deploy it, simply perform a search and click on the three vertical dots icon that appears to the right of the URL.
