With the flood of announcements and releases at the annual Developer Conference Google I/O, the search company didn’t forgot to discuss about its basic business – Search.
A new ‘Rich Cards’ format to display search results has been announced at the I/O conference. The ‘Rich Cards’ are an extension of the previously launched ‘Rich Snippets’ and are aimed at providing a more engaging and visual way to display your content.
Rich Cards are a bite-sized versions of the informative cards displayed in the Google Search Results on Web. The ‘Rich Cards’ will replace ‘Rich Snippets’ on mobile search results and provide users with a bigger card with a larger image placement as compared to Snippets.
You’ll be able to view Rich Cards for only two categories at the moment: recipes and movies. And you would initially only be able to exploit this feature using google.com in English(other languages coming soon). So, if you currently go to google.com on your mobile and search for ‘Mac and Cheese recipe’ or ‘Captain America:Civil War’ then you’ll be able to see a gallery of scrollable cards on the top of search results.
This change not only introduces a change in the user-experience but also provides the site owners/bloggers with an opportunity to bank upon, and rank higher in search results. If you’re a movie review or recipe site, you can use a prominent image for each post. It gives the users what they really want to see up-front and center, diverting more traffic to your website.
The change comes with a set of comprehensive new tools to help monitor your Cards performance, and tweak the markup to provide better result in real time. You can also keep tabs on how many of your Cards have been indexed in the search results.
Google even though has spread its wings in each segment of technology, but it still remains true to its roots. It is evolving Search beyond just the ten blue links to bring a richer and faster experience to the users. Google will keep on experimenting new features like, black links and introduce features like AMP and ‘local source’ tag to provide an enhanced search experience.
