Update: Google also posted on the Enterprise Blog about how you can utilize richer snippets for Site Search.
Original Article: Today at Google’s Searchology event, the company announced (among other things) that it was rolling out richer snippets. The snippets will extract and show more useful info from results than the current ones, Google says.
“For example, if you are thinking of trying out a new restaurant and are searching for reviews, rich snippets could include things like the average review score, the number of reviews, and the restaurant’s price range,” says a joint post to the Google Blog from Marissa Mayer and Jack Menzel.
They explain that Google can do not this on their own. It us up to webmasters to contribute to this. “We hope that web publishers will help us by adopting microformats and RDFa standards to mark up their HTML and bring this structured data to the surface,” they say. “This will help people better understand the information you have on your page so they can spend more time there and less on Google.”
That is one theory. Another would be that users would get all the info they need right from the SERP and have no reason to click through to the actual site. This would certainly depend on the individual result, and the information that accompanied it as well as the user’s intent. It’s just something for publishers to consider. How much information do you want to give away before the click?
The richer snippets will be rolled out gradually. Those who are interested in getting participating in this can read up at the rich snippets help page Google has set up.
