A featured snippet accordion
Over on Twitter +Dan Leveille
posted a screenshot of Google query results for "pet crab" (http://bit.ly/1LHAbwU
), and this list of featured snippets was independently noted by +Ajay Prasad
I'm calling this a "list of featured snippets" because that's what it appears to be, with some nuances.
- The questions under "People also ask" are indeed questions of the sort that typically return featured snippets, rather than related queries (those related searches listed at the bottom of the page are quite different than what's found on this list).
- The featured snippets in the accordion include a link to search for the question that forms the snippet title. This makes sense as, unlike a stand-alone featured snippet (e.g. http://bit.ly/1LHBc8c
), the accordion snippets we're triggered directly by the user's query.
At the end of the day I see this fundamentally as a user interface change more than anything else, but there's definitely insights to be derived from the accordion list of questions because AFAIK this is the first time we've seen Google generate a list of related questions
rather than a list of related searches which, as per the first point above, are quite different things.
Dan in his tweet frames this as "Google is now recommending related #KnowledgeVault
answers", but I'd be hard-pressed to say that this derives from the Knowledge Vault which, you'll recall, is "a Web-scale probabilistic knowledge base that combines extractions from Web content (obtained via analysis of text, tabular data, page structure, and human annotations) with prior knowledge derived from existing knowledge repositories." (http://bit.ly/1tDaS4Z
) That is, a fact engine (still AFAIK unverified in the wild) that would be more likely to return Knowledge Graph-type results in the form of direct factual answers and/or a Knowledge Panel (e.g. http://bit.ly/1LHCkbZ
As per the recent SEL article on featured snippets from +Eric Enge
) the key here in being featured in one is "good, user-centered page design."
A note that I showed the collapsed and expanded forms of the accordion to note:
- The variety of sources drawn upon, including both
commercial websites and Wikipedia
- The presence of petsmart.com
in both the featured snippets and
the SERPs (an otherwise sometimes-seen feature of featured snippets reinforced here.
Finally, as others have noted .... "pet crab"? :) FWIW I haven't been able to generate this for any other "pet [insert animal name here]" query, which makes the oddness of this result even odder IMO (the example query from Ajay is far more pedestrian). #featuredsnippets #google