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Jump to the information you want right from the search snippets
September 25, 2009
For most search results, Google shows you a few lines of text to give you an idea of what the page is about — we call this a "search snippet." Recently, we've enhanced the search snippet with two new features that make it easier to find information buried deep within a page.
Normally, a search snippet shows how a page, as a whole, relates to a your query by excerpting content that appears near and around where your query terms show on the page. But what if only one section of the page is relevant to your search?
That's where these new features can help, by providing links within the snippet to relevant sections of the page, making it faster and easier to find what you're looking for. Imagine, for example, that we're researching trans fats and cholesterol, and their effects on the body. If we start with a generic query like [
trans fats
], Google returns several results with lots of information about trans fats in general, including this result from Wikipedia:
Now, included with the snippet are links to specific sections within the page, covering different subtopics of trans fats. Since we're particularly interested in what's healthy and what's not, "
Nutritional guidelines
" is probably where the most relevant information is. Clicking this link will take you directly to that section, midway down the page.
Now imagine we're particularly interested in learning about good cholesterol and what levels of it are healthy, so we try a more specific query, [
good cholesterol level
]. The top result is from the American Heart Association and has tons of information about cholesterol levels. The specific information about good (HDL) cholesterol, however, is contained in one section titled "Your HDL (good) cholesterol level". Since the query was more specific, the snippet for this result now provides the option to "jump to" just this section of the website.
Clicking on "
Jump to Your HDL (
good
)
cholesterol level
" takes you directly to the most relevant information on the page:
Clicking on the title of the snippet ("What Your Cholesterol Levels Mean") still takes you to the top of the page, as always.
If you're a webmaster and would like to have these links appear for your webpages, take a look at the
Google Webmaster Central Blog
for info on some of the things you can do. And in the meantime, we hope these enhancements help you find the information you're looking for faster.
Posted by Chris Kern, Snippets Team
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