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May 26, 2009

Google Enhances Snippets with Thumbnails

After extracting a lot of interesting information from web pages (dates, locations, author names), Google experiments with displaying the number of images embedded in a web page and a list of thumbnails above the snippet. Patrick Altoft posted a screenshot that shows a search result which includes 17 images, but only 9 of them were picked by Google.


The feature is not available for everyone, but if it's launched, I suspect that Google will only show the enhanced snippet for pages that embed a lot of images.

A similar feature is available if you click on "search options" and select "images from the page", like in this search for [mouse]. Google will show at most 2 thumbnails next to each search result. Thumbnails "can help you quickly identify whether the page is relevant to your search term. For example, if you see an image of a furry little critter when you search for [mouse], you can probably deduce that the page isn't talking about computer equipment," explains Google's help center.

4 comments:

  1. Google started to show additional information for web pages that include reviews: their date and the rating.

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  2. Google start showing also twitter posts related to that search in real time. This is great thinks beacause as I know it is the only real time information that comes on google search

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  3. The snippets are useful in giving a preview of the site.

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  4. I usually use the image search to see what sites are related to my search term(s).

    ReplyDelete

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