Google introduces 'Structured Snippets'

A collaboration between Google’s Research and Web Search team has created what they’ve called ‘structured snippets’, an extension to the already heavily used Knowledge Graph.

Structured Snippets advance to the semantic web, with Google gathering more and more information from various sources of the web to provide their uses with accurate and insightful data about a given subject. With structured snippets, information uses machine learning techniques to look at tables on the web and pull the most relevant information, filtering out those pesky irrelevant results. There’s also some other algorithms running in the background, which look at the quality and relevance of the information you’re given.

Above: You’ll notice Maximum resolution, Battery, Sensor and Shutter are now marked up.

It’s appearance on queries is a little varied at the moment, we’ve been finding it across a few different places from local events, to notable people in history and cartoon characters. The examples Google gave are for the query nikon d700 and Superman are both showing different examples of the structured snippet update.

Above: Some useful information about Superman such as Created by, First appearance and Place of origin.

Above: This is the AWS Meetup we’re running and as you can see Google have marked up the location and date of this. Useful!

You can read the full announcement here. We should see further advancements in the coming months with better accuracy across results and more content as they enhance this feature.

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