Snippets in Search Engine Results

Snippets: Short descriptions/excerpts from websites in search engine results.

• Introduced by Google in 1998.

• Automatically generated based on site content and query terms.

• Key query terms are bolded.

• Computed at query time; vary by query.

• Content from anywhere on the page.

• Forums: May display post count, authors, date.

• Scholarly articles: May display author, year, citation.

Snippets as Summarization

• Automatic summarization.

• Document summarization.

• Two approaches: Extraction: Selecting existing text, Abstraction: Building a semantic representation.

• Primarily focuses on extractive methods.

Featured Snippets

• Answers query directly on the search results page.

• Introduced in 2016.

• Appears above #1 spot.

• Pulled from Page 1 results.

• Not necessarily the #1 result.

• Excerpt best answers the query.

• Three Types:

• Paragraph: Direct definition.

• List: Bulleted/numbered list.

• Table: Data in table format.

Modifying Your Page to Produce a Featured Snippet

• Simple on-page adjustments.

• Fuels voice search.

• Tips:

1. Add "What Is [Keyword]" heading.

2. Use the "is statement".

3. Define the topic in 2-3 sentences.

4. Match the format (paragraph, list, table).

5. Don't use first person.

TLDR (Too Long Didn't Read)

• For popular queries:

• Paid ads

• Featured snippet

• People Also Ask

• Portion of #1 organic result

• Difficult to be found in organic search.

• Above the fold: visible without scrolling.

Extracting a Snippet is Not Always Easy

• Example: "Tesla reports financial results" using "earnings".

• Example: "cloud computing" snippet from meta-description.

How Does Google Generate Snippets?

• Search for Google patents with the term "snippets".

Guidelines for Snippet Generation (Based on US Patent 8,145,617)

• Location-Based Rules:

• Based on the location of the query terms in the page.

• Paragraph scoring.

• Documents with abstracts, summaries, introductions.

• Ends of pages with conclusion or summarization.

• Language-Dependent Rules:

• Punctuation, sentence endings.

• Word length.

• Bold or italicized words.

• Rejection Rules:

• Short snippets.

• Mostly punctuation.

• Too many bold/italicized words.

Algorithm for Snippet Generation (US Patent 8,145,617)

1. Identify paragraphs with query terms.

2. Score paragraphs.

3. Return phrase with the highest score.

• Selects paragraph near beginning if there is abstract, executive summary, or long introduction.

• Uses end of document when there is a conclusion or summarization at the end.

• Scoring includes:

• Paragraphs shorter than a threshold score 0.

• The k-th paragraph from the start gets a score of kth{\text -position Factor + max(actual paragraph length, maxParagraphLen)}

• The paragraph with the highest score is selected for the snippet.

Snippets Based on User Profile (US Patent 8,631,006)

• Personalized based on user's profile.

• Terms related to user's profile are identified.

• Term profile compared to user's profile.

• Similarity score.

• High-scoring terms used in identifying snippets.

• Terms may be added to search terms.

Featured Snippet Study

• Paragraph snippets are the most common.

• Position 1 is the most common ranking position.

• Image thumbs are most frequent other snippets.

Google's People Also Ask (PAA) Feature

• Introduced in 2015.

• PAA Result for query "how does google generate snippets".

• The "People Also Ask" box appeared on 364 keywords out of 1,788 (20%).

People Also Ask (PAA) is Growing Fast

• Google universal SERP result.

• Related to the featured snippet

• Each box contains one to four related questions.

• Site URL appears below each answer.

• PAAs are growing faster than snippets.

Rich Snippets

• Announced in 2009.

• Allows developers to include information for Google's algorithm.

• Provides a summary of information.

• Rich Snippets Examples: People Snippets

• Snippet describes the pages with information about the individual, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google.

• Rich Snippets Examples: Events

• The Fillmore theater can highlight future concerts by regularly updating their webpage with the latest rich snippet information.

Advantages of Rich Snippets

• Webmasters: Add useful information.

• Purpose: Provide more information to users.

• Two good reasons for using rich snippets:

1. Additional traffic to a webpage

2. Higher Click Through Rate

Joint Effort by Google, Yahoo! and Bing

• Agreed on a single standard in June 2011.

• Established schema.org.

• Standardized on the microdata format.

Rich Snippet Technology Definitions

• Google suggests using the microdata formalism for snippets.

• Two other formalisms:

• RDFa

• Microformat Encoding

Schema.org Vocabulary

• Defines an object hierarchy.

• Most general item: Thing (name, description, url, image).

• Person, Place, and Organization are types of Things.

• More specific items inherit properties.

• Commonly used types:

• Creative works: book, movie, music recording, recipe, TV Series

• Embedded object: image, video

• Event

• Organization

• Person

• Place, Local Business, e.g., Restaurant

• Product, Offer, Aggregate Offer

• Review, AggregateRating

Entities in Rich Snippet Encodings

• Supported by Google:

• Software applications

• Breadcrumbs

• Events

• Music

• Businesses and Organizations

• People

• Products

• Recipes

• Review Ratings

• Reviews

• Videos

Rich Snippets - Microformats and Microdata

• Microformats: Use existing HTML (e.g., class attribute).

• Microdata: Extends HTML5 with new attributes like itemprop.

MicroData Example: A Web Page About the Movie Avatar

• Add itemscope to the HTML tag.

Avatar Example Continued

• Use itemprop to label properties.

List of Movie Properties (Schema.org/Movie)

• Properties: description, image, name, url, etc.

MicroData Markup for "Pirates of the Caribbean"

• Includes: movie name, description, director, author, actors.

More Examples: Clarifying Hard to Understand Content

• The `` element has attributes: dates, times, durations.

Schema Markup Generator

• Web interface tool.

Google's Rich Snippets Testing Tool

• Tools for testing structured data.

Structured Data Testing

• Tool for examining microformat data.

Google Introduces New Tags for Snippet Control

• Robots meta tag:

• nosnippet: No textual snippet.

• max-snippet: [number]: Max text length.

• max-video-preview: [number]: Max video duration.

• max-image-preview: [setting]: Max image size.

• data-nosnippet: HTML attribute on span, div, section.

• nosnippet blocks all snippets for the tagged page.

• If both nosnippet and data-nosnippet appear in a page, nosnippet takes priority.

Summary

• Five categories:

1. Regular snippets

2. Rich snippets

3. Google News

4. Entity types

5. Features snippets

Extending Schema.org to handle PAA

• QAPage

• Question

• HowTo