Petits fours in your search results

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Recently we made a change to show more results from a domain for certain types of queries—this helped searchers get to their desired result even faster. Today we're expanding the feature so that, when appropriate, more queries show additional results from a domain. As a webmaster, you'll appreciate the fact that these results may bring targeted visitors directly to the pages they're interested in.

Here's an example: in the past, the query "moma" (the Museum of Modern Art), might have triggered two results from the official site:

Search result page showing 2 results from the site of the Museum of Modern Art

With this iteration, our search results may show:

  • Up to four web results from each domain (that is, several domains may have multiple results)
  • Single-line snippets for the additional results, to keep them compact

As before, we still provide links to results from a variety of domains to ensure people find a diverse set of sources relevant to their searches. However, when our algorithms predict pages from a particular site are likely to be most relevant, it makes sense to provide additional direct links in our search results.

Search result page showing 4 results from the site of the Museum of Modern Art

Like all the hundreds of changes we make a year, we're trying to help users quickly reach their desired result. Even though we're constantly improving our algorithms, our general advice still holds true: create compelling, search-engine friendly sites in order to attract users, buzz, and often targeted traffic!