Tuesday, December 13, 2022
Walk into a library and ask for a book, without specifying which one. After puzzled looks, you’ll
probably get dozens of questions from the helpful librarian to try to identify the specific book:
there are so many of them (over 129,864,880
to be more precise)! The dialogue is actually very similar to what we observe on Twitter when
folks are trying to find a way to talk about a certain search feature or UI element of a search
results page: what are those stars called? And how do I get them to appear for my site?
Google Search result pages aren’t composed of over 129,864,880 elements, yet identifying the one
you want to search for can be quite challenging. The elements can be very similar to each other,
sometimes utterly obscure, and other times they have several colloquial names that aren’t that
self explanatory either. We want to help with this.
Introducing the Visual Elements Gallery
The brand new Visual Elements Gallery
was built to help you identify the most common and impactful visual elements of a search results
page. It contains the 22 visual elements that are most likely to appear on search result pages and are
also relevant to site owners and SEOs, including:
- Attribution:
The elements that help people quickly identify the source behind the
search result with visual identifiers like the name of the site, the URL, and favicon. - Text results:
Historically called “10 blue links” and “web results”, text results are
the elements that have been with us since 1995, when we were still called
Backrub. We believe that the name “text results”
represents more precisely what the results are based on—the textual content of the indexed pages. - Video and
image results:
Historically called “image and video universal results”, the
video and image results are based on the respective media indexed in the context of their
respective landing pages. - Exploration features: Commonly called “People Also Ask”, these visual elements help
users broaden their search journeys.
Each element group is accompanied by an abstract illustration of how the visual element might
look like on the search result page, with labels for what each element is called and where you
can find more information about how you might influence or enable it for your website. The
abstracted design also helps with keeping the guide consistent across the 18 languages Search
Central supports.
Visual Elements of the future
Our new setup makes it easier for us to add new visual elements to the gallery without too much
effort on our part; that is in fact our plan: as a visual element becomes popular on search
result pages, we may add it to the gallery. However, we aim to only add those elements that hold
some significance for site owners and SEOs.
We designed this new gallery so it’s easier to talk and learn about the elements that appear
on the search results page. If you want to chat with us about them, leave a comment on Twitter
or in the Search Central Help forums.
You can also send feedback on the documentation page itself
by using the Send Feedback button.
