So just to remind everybody I'm visiting the Kirkland office
and they said, "You know what, let's grab a video camera and just talk about a few things
and have a little bit of fun and put these videos up on the web!"
So one of the things that we thought we'd talk about is a snippet.
What are the different parts of a snippet,
how do we choose which parts of the snippet to show, what gets shown, all that sort of stuff.
So since we are up in the Pacific Northwest,
it seemed fitting to try Starbucks and just talk a little bit about, you know,
walk through the snippet for Starbucks
and what it looks like and talk through the different parts.
Alright, so the first thing that you'll see is the title.
And that's typically what you set on the title of your webpage.
So "Starbucks Homepage" is what Starbucks used for www.starbucks.com.
Now, in general, Google reserves the right to try to
change the snippet and make it as useful as possible for our users,
but we are always doing all kinds of different experiments. Like you know,
is it more helpful to show 2 dots or 3 dots,
you know, you want to end with dots, do you want to start with leading spaces,
how do you find the most relevant part of the page to try to say this is what we should be showing?
But the majority of the time, you have a great deal of control about how things get presented.
So in this case Starbucks used the title "Starbucks Homepage."
And just a quick bit of SEO advice for Starbucks, you know, homepage, eh, a few people might search for that,
but I might say something like "Starbucks Coffee" because people are a little more likely to search for that.
Anyway, okay, enough of the free advice for Starbucks.
The next thing that you see is something we call the snippet.
So in this case, it says "Starbucks Coffee Company is the leading retailer, roaster and brand of specialty coffee... on like that."
Now, where does that snippet come from? It can come from many different places.
Suppose for example we weren't able to crawl the URL. Maybe it was forbidden by robots.txt.
Maybe for whatever reason it was down and we couldn't get a copy of it.
We don't have anything from the page, not even the meta description tag, nothing at all.
In those cases, we sometimes do rely on the Open Directory Project.
So Starbucks, I wouldn't be surprised if it was in the Open Directory.
So if we weren't able to crawl the page, we might pull the description from there.
Another thing we sometimes we do is pull the description from a place within the page.
So, suppose you got a phone book and you are looking for somebody's name and the name is way down at the bottom.
It's a lot more helpful to show that person's name from the bottom of the page and
maybe a few words from either side of that person's name than it is to show the first fifty words from that page.
So we do try to find the most relevant parts of a page.
Sometimes it's a single snippet, sometimes it's multiple parts of a page.
And combine that together and give people a little bit of context,
"Is this page really what i'm looking for?"
But neither of those two.
It's not the Open Directory page and it's not directly from within the content from the page body itself.
In this case, I looked into it, and if you view source, this is the meta description tag.
So we did a post on the Google webmaster blog just a little while ago
and talked about how these snippets get picked.
And it turns out that you can use your own meta description tag
and in many cases that's exactly what we'll choose to use as our snippet.
Now you want to be careful because this is a very fine snippet,
but maybe there are some other snippets that would convert better.
You know, people read it and say, "Oh I really want to click through and find more about that."
So you can experiment with different meta descriptions
and see does one description get more clicks, does one convert better, things like that.
But we do use several different sources of data when deciding how to pull things into a snippet.
In this case Starbucks is also a company,
so we show a little, we call it a plus box, where if you want, you can click
and you can expand and you'll get a stock chart for Starbucks.
You can see whether they've been doing well in the market or not.
There's a lot of these different options.
For example, if you have an address on your page,
many times we'll show a plus box and say "View a map of" and then you can have your address.
And we are always looking for new ways to surface interesting data.
If you go to www.google.com/experimental,
we do have views where you can look at search results on a timeline, search results on a map,
you can even see all the search results with images and even measurements.
So if you've done a search like koalas, or koala bears,
you can say "Show me the measurements" and it will show all the things like,
oh koala bears are 20 pounds and stuff like that, so it's really helpful.
In general, whatever interesting information you have on your page that users would be interested in,
we'll try to surface that or show relevant information like stock quotes and stuff like that.
There's also something a little subtle you may not have noticed, but we bolded the Starbucks.
And that's because someone has done the query "Starbucks."
So often times if you do a certain query and those query words are on the page,
we'll make them in bold so people know what you typed is actually on this page.
So we know about stemming, we know about morphology, we know about synonyms.
So if you type in "Car," we can sometimes return search results that have "Automobile."
But that wouldn't be bolded or wouldn't be as likely to be bolded.
What's more likely is whatever you type in is what's going to be bolded.
So that gives the user a little more information that shows how relevant that page really is.
Working down a little bit, you can see the URL that you are actually going to land on.
12k stands for 12 kilobytes, which is relatively small page. That means it'll load pretty quickly.
And then you see the cache link.
So imagine, for example, that the site is down.
Maybe you, if you are the webmaster, you accidentally deleted it.
Well then you can look at the cache page and you can recover the source of that page that you put it back up again.
The cache page also has a really interesting feature.
If you click on it, it will show when we last crawled that page.
So you can say "OK well, today is October 7th," look at the cache page, and "Oh we last crawled this page on October 6th."
So you can see how fresh our search results are.
Sometimes if our results are very fresh, we'll even show a little indicator right down the snippet that says
we crawled this 17 hours ago to let you know that it's especially fresh.
"Similar pages" shows you related pages to Starbucks so maybe other businesses or other pages you'd be interested in.
And a lot of the times if you are logged into Google you'll see "Note this."
If you are a student or if you are doing research this is really handy. It works with Google Notebook
and all it does that it says "save this off." As I'm doing my research I want to save this result and be able to come back to it later
and maybe aggregate all this stuff together on some research that I'm doing.
And then this is really nice. This would actually be a little indented on the snippet
What we call this is sitelinks.
There are a couple of things you need to know about sitelinks.
First off, no money is involved.
Somebody always asks, so did Starbucks pay money to get that?
No, it's completely algorithmic, there's no money whatsoever.
And the second thing is it is completely algorithmic. It's not done by hand
so it's not like we go to Starbucks and we say, "Oh, they'd be interested in the store locator and nutrition and stuff like that."
But there's a lot of sophistication going on here.
For example, this page, the title is actually "Starbucks Store Locator,"
but you don't need to see that multiple times, so we just say "Store Locator".
And if you look at this page, the title is actually something like "Beverage Details and something something something."
And in fact, the link to that page says "Nutrition."
So we are sort of selective. We try to pick the shortest little description
that gives people enough information where they can say,
"Oh, the store locator is what I want! I'm going to go directly there,"
or "I wanted to find out if I get a no whip mocha, how many calories that is,"
so I can go straight to the nutrition page.
So it's completely algorithmic; no money's involved in that.
And when you get to the bottom, if we have a lot of results for a page, maybe we show one or two,
and then we'll say you know what, maybe you want to see more results from Starbucks.
And what that lets you have is a little bit more diversity.
So you can see one or two results from Starbucks and then maybe you want to see other results for that query.
So that helps ensure diversity on the results page.
And at the same time, lets you dive deeper if you want to.
So that's just a very quick tour of what a snippet is on Google,
how we compute some of it and hopefully gives you a few ideas about ways that you can look at and improve your snippets
that you can get more users and hopefully a few more conversions as well.