Customize your results snippets with structured data
Custom Search themes make it easy for you to customize the look and feel of
your search results pages. And if you want to take the customization gig further, you can also
customize the result snippet—a small sample of content that gives search users an idea of
what's in the webpage—by using structured data.
When you are reading a
webpage that reviews a film, you can figure out what the title is, what reviewers thought of
the film, and how they rated it. You can even search for stores with the best prices for the
DVD. Structured data can convey the meaning of such key information to computers.
Structured data formats—such as microformats, RDFa, and PageMaps—are semantic
markup that you add to your HTML page. Structured data make web content more meaningful to
machines. These attributes do not change the formatting of your website, they just make the
text enclosed within the XHTML tags "understandable" by computers and influence what shows up
in the result snippets.
When you tag your webpages with structured
data, Custom Search indexes them and sends the metadata back in the XML results for your page.
You can then take this XML feed and transform it into HTML results that showcase key
information—such as image thumbnails, summaries, dates, authorship, ratings, and prices.
Having the most relevant information in your search results makes the webpages in your site
more compelling to your users.
You can, for example, create the
following kind of rich snippets:
You can
even add thumbnails and actions that let your users download files or make purchases.
To learn
more, read the
Custom Search
Developer's Guide.
By Kevin Griffin Lim, Custom Search Team
