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Google's 'Structured Snippets' put useful facts under your search results

Google's 'Structured Snippets' put useful facts under your search results

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Google is continuing to harness everything its search engine is learning through Knowledge Graph with a new feature it's calling "Structured Snippets." For select search terms, you'll now see facts and data points appear right underneath individual search results. That might sound confusing, so Google's explaining it with a visual example. If you search for Nikon's D7100 right now, you'll see the camera's core specs appear beneath DPreview's search result, like this:

Google structured snippets

Whether you see snippets for a given search is pretty hit or miss right now. Google pulls all of this data from tables on the linked website, and the company says it'll keep working to ensure the "facts" you see are relevant — and hopefully correct. "Fact quality will vary across results based on page content, and we are continually enhancing the relevance and accuracy of the facts we identify and display," the Google Research team wrote today. Snippets also appear on your smartphone. It's admittedly a tiny addition; you're already presented with specifications and key details in the sidebar when searching for popular items or people. But in the end it still makes Google smarter and means you'll have to do less clicking in some cases, so we're all for it.