New: refinement options for metadata in Google Site Search

Earlier this year, we announced support for Rich Snippets in Google Site Search results. If you provide in-page metadata markup via RDFa, Microformats, or PageMaps, Google Site Search extracts the metadata and returns it as PageMaps in your XML results, so you can render this structured data in your search results. Rich snippets enable website owners to customize the user interface and expose images, ratings, authors and other interesting pieces of metadata with search results.

Today, metadata support in Google Site Search just got a whole lot better. We now provide the ability for website owners to use these metadata attributes and provide refinement options on the front-end.

For example, website owners can build a rich search interface that not only allows users to search on keywords but also refine the search results based on the author of the document, user rating or othermetadata attributes.

We've enabled a way for you to restrict your search results via use of a special operator. Let's say that you wanted to restrict the results to those results that were authored by a specific author, e.g., "typicaluser". We can do this easily by adding the following restriction in our search query: [economy more:pagemap:document-author:typicaluser]. This gives us exactly what we want – all of the documents with keyword economy and authored by "typicaluser".

We've also recently launched a Rich Snippet preview tool. This tool allows you to view not only the Rich Snippets markup recognized for Google web search, but also the additional customized markup that we support in Google Site Search. You can immediately preview how your web page will be processed after indexing, and whatmetadata attributes will be returned in PageMaps in your Google Site Search results.

For more information on Google Site Search, please visit Google Site Search.

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager, Google Enterprise Search

Explaining top result and date biasing in Google Site Search

We know that businesses want website search solutions that are easy to implement, require little maintenance, and consistently return the best search results, without requiring time-consuming manual refinements. We also know that there can be times when businesses want additional control over the search they offer on their websites. That's when two important features in Google Site Search come in handy: "top result" and "date biasing." We want to highlight those today.

Google Site Search lets you customize search results in several ways to make sure items you want featured reach the top of the results list. With top result biasing, you can target the top search results from specific sections of your website (such as your product catalog or newsletter sign up page) to make sure visitors can find the most relevant pages within your site.

Site admins can also choose to organize search results based on the age of the documents with something we call date biasing. If you want to make sure that, say, a new PDF makes it to the top of the results rather than an outdated version, you can switch on date biasing and decide the level of influence (low, medium, high or maximum) so visitors can easily find the most recent version.

These are only two of the suite of customization features that are available with Google Site Search. To learn more, visit google.com/sitesearch.

Posted by Anna Bishop, Google Enterprise Search team

Promoting search results: now easier with Google Site Search

Studies consistently show that good website search keeps people "on site" longer and improves conversion rates when it's time for business. But even without the evidence, common sense suggests that people get more satisfaction out of their web experience when they find what they're looking for – the information that's most relevant to their search. Algorithms do a great job with this, but sometimes, site owners and admins know their customers – and their content – well enough to think beyond the algorithm and help searchers find that one link that delivers the goods.

That's where Google Site Search Promotions – the latest enhancement to Google Site Search – comes in, starting today.

Google Site Search Promotions allows website owners and admins to create special results that appear as the first result to a user's search, and define the search terms for triggering those results. That raises a specific page, or URL to the top of the search results when those search terms are used, presenting viewers with a more detailed, illustrated link that stands out among the other results. Any URL can be promoted – it doesn't need to be specified as an included site or page in your Sites tab.

Promotions are easy to manage, simply by creating and uploading a promotions file or using the promotions page in the GSS control panel. You can include of a brief description and image for each promotion, and you can add or edit these additional items as well as appearance elements such as border and background color, just by using the Promotion Design Settings menu.

As this screenshot shows, Promotions make it easier to highlight key events, announcements, services or product launches on your visitors' search results. In this example, eHealthInsurance.com's administrator "promoted" the most relevant link, added an image and a two-line description, and enabled the most relevant search result to be displayed first.

Although this functionality has been available to GSS users through subscribed links, today's changes make promoting the best links more speedy and intuitive, and allow admins to add multiple promotions for the same query.

Stay tuned to this blog for upcoming enhancements to Google Site Search (and more). We hope you like the business results that this new Promotions feature delivers.

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager, Google Enterprise Search

Leveraging rich snippets with Google Site Search

Today, we announced Rich Snippets for Google web search, a new presentation of snippets that highlight structured data embedded in web pages. Rich Snippets provide summary information, including important page-specific attributes, to help users quickly identify result relevance. Experiments on Google have shown that users find the additional data valuable – if they see useful and relevant information from a web page, they are more likely to click through to it. Our web search team is currently experimenting with a limited set of attributes for reviews and user profiles that webmasters can provide through in-line markup in their web pages by using open standards such as microformats or RDFa.

Since Google Site Search leverages our web search platform, Google Site Search customers can benefit from this new functionality as well. In fact, Google Site Search customers can define their own custom attributes that we'll index and return with your site search results. In addition to microformats and RDFa, you can also provide custom metadata within your webpages via special markup called page maps. A page map identifies specific attributes that are recognized and preserved by Google at index time, and returned along with search results for presentation to the user.

So if you're using Google Site Search on your website, you can now control further how your content appears in search results. You can showcase key information, such as image thumbnails, summaries, ratings in your result snippets if you provide the appropriate markup on your pages.

Rich Snippets attribute information for Google Site Search is only returned in XML (via <PageMap> tags), so you can use your own customized presentation controls. Indexing of the rich snippets information can have unspecified latency, as some pages are indexed and refreshed more frequently than others, and page map attributes may not be indexed from all web pages.

As an illustration of Rich Snippets, the web page featured in the following example provides custom information about an image thumbnail that is displayed in the rich snippet of the result along with date, author and category information.

If you are getting results back via XML, then the custom attributes are returned in the results within the PageMap tag, as shown below. You can parse the DataObjects within the PageMap tag and provide customized presentation of the relevant attributes.

If you are new to Google Site Search and would like to provide Google quality search results on your website, visit www.google.com/sitesearch

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager, Google Enterprise Search