True to Google form, it was found that the fine folk of Google were testing some form of knowledge graph data within the snippet of search results. Now, Google has officially confirmed the new feature on their Google Research Blog.
The update is being dubbed “Structured Snippets” (love that alliteration). Snippets of data that relate to the search query will now be shown within the search results. According to Google, the data comes from the notorious Knowledge Graph, as well as other sources of data.
The WebTables research team has been working to extract and understand tabular data on the Web with the intent to surface particularly relevant data to users. Our data is already used in the Research Tool found in Google Docs and Slides; Structured Snippets is the latest collaboration between Google Research and the Web Search team employing that data to seamlessly provide the most relevant information to the user. We use machine learning techniques to distinguish data tables on the Web from uninteresting tables, e.g., tables used for formatting web pages. We also have additional algorithms to determine quality and relevance that we use to display up to four highly ranked facts from those data tables.
Here’s an example of what this looks like on mobile with the query “superman”:
Google hopes that this will improve quality of searches based on page content, and are using these snippets to provide a better search experience for users.