Google seems to be bucket testing a feature that allows users to specify how detailed the summary blurbs in their search results will be. In an ongoing discussion here, one user comments that the three available options are Small (which omits a summary entirely), Medium (the current default length), and Long (which is around four times longer than normal). The changes affect more than just aesthetics – the Long setting apparently consists of both the standard meta summary as well as text pulled from the page itself, which could help users weed out sites with nice descriptions but little actual content.
Because search is such an integral part of its business, Google has to be careful whenever it thinks about implementing a new search-related feature. The company regularly tests out unannounced new features across a small percentage of its users to see if they are worth implementing on a wider scale (this is called bucket testing). Earlier this summer we saw a preview of a Digg-like voting feature that has yet to reach the general public.
If you’re lucky enough to have the new feature, let us know in the comments how well it seems to be working (the feature isn’t enabled for me, so I can’t test it out).
Thanks to Srinath T V for the tip.
I think that the long is a great idea from a user’s perspective. However, this is awful to SEOs. Users will be able to get a lot of information without clicking through to webpages, and crappy pages won’t be clicked as often on long mode.
Also, Google ads currently have summaries that fit in with search results. They are shorter, but not enough to where they don’t go well with the other search results. If long were to be enabled by default, then the ads would look even more out of place being so short. What if Google were to also make the ads longer? Probably not, but it’s a possibility.
“I think that the long is a great idea from a user’s perspective. However, this is awful to SEOs. Users will be able to get a lot of information without clicking through to webpages, and crappy pages won’t be clicked as often on long mode…”
I’m guessing that’s probably part of the point!
not lucky
sounds like DIGG in another version
I’m happy Google didn’t make the dumbest move and buy DIGG. They don’t deserve to be bought at the price they wanna seel their company for…lol
Do you know that your links from here that you put in every comment you make dont give you any google juice because of the ‘nofollow’ tag?
Just sayin
Did you know you just put a hole in that guys SEO dreams?
At least it gets him readers’ juice.
When I saw the title of this post on iGoogle, I immediately thought: “Google Bucket? Wtf?”
yea agree… I was also like Is Google is getting into selling ‘buckets’ ? coz buckets full of water help to clean up people and then cleaned up people are good at organizing things such as “information”
Microsoft (MSN / Live) Search used to do this but no longer does.
So does each search results page still show 10 results or does it cut it short to make room for longer descriptions? otherwise it looks pretty cool, as long as they give webmasters some way to influence the blurb structure.
It goes from 15(small) resutls to 10(medium) to 6(large) from what I’ve seen.
I don’t see why webmasters should be given control over what shows up in the results. Large just shows your search in context in the results similarly to Medium except that there is more “contextual text.”
Hi Mitch. Well now that they have more room, they can finally give webmasters a use-snippet tag so they can opt to include their description. So far Google just puts what they feel like in there, such as your Dmoz description. Just being optimistic
Good one for sure
在中国行不通
I agree with Jake. If Google implements this feature, nobody will visit the websites. It’s not fair. It will be terrible for us, webmasters.
Believing this to be terrible for webmasters simply means your site is of no use to anyone in the first place. Short or long, if the site’s description provides useless and irrelevant information, people shouldn’t be “tricked” into visiting it based on its listing in SERPs.
If the site is good, the blurb will be good…if the site sucks, the blurb will suck – thereby helping people to avoid wasting their time visiting it. Only those attempting to drive traffic to a crappy sites should be adversely affected by this change, in the event that it is ever released to the public. It’s just another way that Google is attempting to separate the wheat from the chaff – and that is as it should be.
“The changes affect more than just aesthetics – the Long setting apparently consists of both the standard meta summary as well as text pulled from the page itself, which could help users weed out sites with nice descriptions but little actual content.”
There is no “standard meta summary”. Google already chooses text from the page itself when it wants to.
Actually, Google only choose text form the page itself if the page lacks a meta description tag.
Wrong, you can provide a meta description and Google will ignore it completely. If they can find the data in a sentence inside of your post/article they will replace your meta description with that because it is more relevant and that is what Google is all about.
Yeah…that’s completely untrue. Google often selects random text from a page even when a META description exists.
something about who you are:
http://neoviky....ho-are-you.html
…….and the most disruptive idea in the world…that can take on Microsoft and Google….
http://neoviky....08/09/inet.html
I’ve also seen this as a sidebar that not only let you choose blurb length but add images for each result as well as pull out key dates from results.
Didn’t screen grab it and haven’t seen it since, but I know it’s out there.
Actually really dug it and wish there were a way to force it to come back
TL
P.S. Speaking of the Google, try my “weekend project” search mashup at http://searchquilt.com/
Longer snippets means news rules. And, new rules means more SEO work. Larger monitor screen display formats mean that more text can comfortably fit on each SERP.
Bigger is better.
Golly-gee, I hope Google put ads next to MY content when they display a larger snippet.
I pay tens of thousands for a great quality. I’m not interested in making money from my work or investment. I want Google to make ad revenue from me providing the most relevant content and users not having to click-thru to my site.
In fact, why not make the snippet larger for results from my site? Can Google do some funky AJAX thing where they can display my entire site content through Google? Minus my ads, of course.
The long version will make SEO more difficult for RIA sites. Search engines already have a hard time indexing RIA sites. Only a small part of the content can be indexed. Once they implement this feature, people looking for transaction (instead of information) will tend to go to traditional sites, simply because the chance of keywords appearing many times in an RIA site is very small.
I think this is bad for the web. Sites will find it less compelling to evolve beyond the traditional SEO friendly sites.