One of the most effective Google search tricks just got better
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| Google: One of the most effective Google search tricks just got better |
Did you know you could use quotation marks to search for a specific word or phrase on Google? It's a terrific way to narrow down what you're looking for. And on Thursday, Google made a change that I believe would be a pleasant improvement: the brief descriptions that display beneath search result links will now be dependent on the location of the cited term on the page.
I've included an excellent illustration that demonstrates how this will actually operate in practice from Google's blog post about the change below. Google searched for "google search," and both of the example's two snippets contain the capitalized term "Google Search." In the past, Google would display results that contained the quoted word or phrase, but the brief description beneath a link might not have provided the precise location of the term on a website.
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In the blog post, Google's Yonghao Jin explains why that was the case and why the company made the move. Because the quoted text can occasionally appear in places in a document that don't encourage the creation of helpful snippets, we didn't always do this in the past. For instance, a word or phrase might be present as a menu item on a page where you can access the site's many sections. These kinds of sections would not be easily readable when a snippet is created around them.
According to user feedback, people conducting quote searches prefer to view the exact location of the quoted text on a page over a general description of the page. This is something that our improvement is meant to help with.
As stated in the blog article, quoted searches come with a few restrictions. Google may have crawled a page when it contained a quote term that has since been removed in an update, or some text may be hidden in a meta description tag or alt text and not be easily visible on a page, for example. Additionally, Google "mostly" bolds quoted text in webpage snippets on desktop; bolding is ineffective for mobile results.
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