Monday, May 26, 2008

Google’s Optimized Discussion Board Result

Haochi Chen stumbled upon what looks like it may be a prototype of an optimized Google result snippet for discussion threads. In a search for e.g. router vs modem, the top result from Computing.net was showing the text “Discussion forum: 3 posts - 2 authors - Dec 8, 2001” below the title link. In this case I can see 4 posts on the Computing.net page, but in other cases the count is correct. While Google makes this experiment – which they may currently only show to a small portion of users – work for different types of discussion boards, it does not work for each and every forum (it does not work for the forum here, for instance).

To join this experiment, go to a a search result page like this one and enter the following into the address bar, hit return, and then search as normal (you can later delete your Google cookies to revert this, but please note I don’t know if there’s any side-effects to the experiment):

javascript:void(document.cookie="PREF=ID=00fb173daf8671b1:TM=1211773860:LM=1211774226:GM=1:S=iRC8su7T5V-q6T0t;path=/; domain=.google.com");

[Thanks Haochi!]

Google’s Optimized Discus ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (2+2)

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