Search engine results page

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A search engine results page (SERP) is a webpage that is displayed by a search engine in response to a query by a user. The main component of a SERP is the listing of results that are returned by the search engine in response to a keyword query.

Contents

The results are of two general types:

The results are normally ranked by relevance to the query. Each result displayed on the SERP normally includes a title, a link that points to the actual page on the Web, and a short description, known as a snippet, showing where the keywords have matched content within the page for organic results. For sponsored results, the advertiser chooses what to display.

With the vast amount of content available online, it's no surprise that a single search query can yield countless pages of results. However, in order to avoid overwhelming users, search engines and personal preferences often limit the number of results displayed per page. As a result, subsequent pages may not be as relevant or ranked as highly as the first. Just like the world of traditional print media and its advertising, this enables competitive pricing for page real estate but is complicated by the dynamics of consumer expectations and intent— unlike static print media where the content and the advertising on every page are the same all of the time for all viewers, despite such hard copy being localized to some degree, usually geographic, like state, metro-area, city, or neighbourhood, search engine results can vary based on individual factors such as browsing habits. [1]

Components

The organic search results, queries, and advertisements are the three main components of the SERP, However, the SERP of major search engines, like Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Sogou may include many different types of enhanced results (organic search, and sponsored) such as rich snippets, images, maps, definitions, answer boxes, videos or suggested search refinements. A study revealed that 97% of queries in Google returned at least one rich feature. [2] Another study on the evolution of SERPs interfaces from 2000 to 2020 shows that SERP are becoming more diverse in terms of elements, aggregating content from different verticals and including more features that provide direct answers. [3] [4]

The major search engines visually differentiate specific content types such as images, news, and blogs. Many content types have specialized SERP templates and visual enhancements on the first search results page.

Search query

Also known as 'user search string', this is the word or set of words that are typed by the user in the search bar of the search engine. The search box is located on all major search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Sogou. Users indicate the topic desired based on the keywords they enter into the search box in the search engine.

Organic results

Organic SERP listings are the natural listings generated by search engines, they list webpages matching the query. The pages are sorted on a relevance score based on a series of metrics generally based upon factors such as quality and relevance of the content, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness of the website and author on a given topic, good user experience, and backlinks. [5]

Each of the matching web pages is presented as a visual element composed of attribution, a title link, and a snippet of the matching webpage showing how the query matched on the page. [6]

Search results pages typically contain numerous organic results, and users tend to view only the first results on the first page. [7] According to a 2019 study, the click-through rates (CTRs) drop significantly after the first few results. [8]

Several major search engines offer "sponsored results" to companies, who may pay the search engine to have their products or services appear above other search hits. This is often done in the form of bidding between companies, where the highest bidder gets the top result. A 2018 report from the European Commission showed that consumers generally avoid these top results, as there is an expectation that the topmost results on a search engine page will be sponsored, and thus less relevant. [9]

Rich snippets

Rich snippets are displayed by Google in the search results pages when a website contains content in structured data markup. Structured data markup helps the Google algorithm to index and understand the content better. Google supports rich snippets for various data types, including products, recipes, reviews, events, news articles, and job postings. [10]

A featured snippet is a summary of an answer to a user's query. This snippet appears at the top of the list of search hits. Google supports the following types of featured snippets: Paragraph Featured Snippet, Numbered List Featured Snippet, Bulleted List Featured Snippet, Table Featured Snippet, YouTube Featured Snippet, Carousel Snippet, Double Featured Snippet, and Two-for-One Featured Snippet. [11]

Knowledge graph

Search engines like Google, Bing, Sogou have started to expand their data into Encyclopedia and other rich sources of information.

Google for example calls this sort of information "Google Knowledge Graph", if a search query matches it will display an additional sub-window on right-hand side with information from its sources. [12] [13] Such panels may offer the user a zero-click result to their query.

Google Discover

Google Discover formerly known as Google Feed is a way of getting topics and news information to users on the homepage below the search box. [14]

Generation

Major search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Sogou primarily use content contained within the page and fallback to metadata tags of a web page to generate the content that makes up a search snippet. [15] Generally, the HTML title tag will be used as the title of the snippet while the most relevant or useful contents of the web page (description tag or page copy) will be used for the description.

Scraping and automated access

Search engine result pages are protected from automated access by a range of defensive mechanisms and terms of service. [16] These result pages are the primary data source for Search engine optimization, the website placement for competitive keywords that has become an important field of business and interest.

The process of harvesting search engine result pages data is usually called "search engine scraping" or in a general form "web crawling" and generates the data SEO-related companies need to evaluate website competitive organic and sponsored rankings. This data can be used to track the position of websites and show the effectiveness of SEO as well as keywords that may need more SEO investment to rank higher.

There is no evidence of Google making any public announcement as to the practice of scraping being in breach of its terms of service, as previously documented in this section, as any such 'warnings' could not, by their nature, apply universally to its users as well as, say, users in countries where Google does not operate, nor would they be capable of applying to a private individual in the same way as they do to one of Google's Ad Partners. Further, crawling itself remains one of the core elements of Google's search functionality and tools; purported 'warnings' against scraping previously attributed to Google, were in reality posts on third-party platforms such as Twitter that were manifestly by individuals not necessarily associated with or employed by Google, and in any event made in a personal capacity alone, rather than in a Google-endorsed formal capacity. [17]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Search</span> Search engine from Google

Google Search is a search engine operated by Google. It allows users to search for information on the Web by entering keywords or phrases. Google Search uses algorithms to analyze and rank websites based on their relevance to the search query. It is the most popular search engine worldwide.

Meta elements are tags used in HTML and XHTML documents to provide structured metadata about a Web page. They are part of a web page's head section. Multiple Meta elements with different attributes can be used on the same page. Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other metadata not provided through the other head elements and attributes.

Spamdexing is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes. It involves a number of methods, such as link building and repeating related and/or unrelated phrases, to manipulate the relevance or prominence of resources indexed in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. Unpaid traffic may originate from different kinds of searches, including image search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

Relative to some web resource, a backlink is a link from some other website to that web resource. A web resource may be a website, web page, or web directory.

Pay-per-click (PPC) is an internet advertising model used to drive traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher when the ad is clicked.

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily through paid advertising. SEM may incorporate search engine optimization (SEO), which adjusts or rewrites website content and site architecture to achieve a higher ranking in search engine results pages to enhance pay per click (PPC) listings and increase the Call to action (CTA) on the website.

Local search is the use of specialized Internet search engines that allow users to submit geographically constrained searches against a structured database of local business listings. Typical local search queries include not only information about "what" the site visitor is searching for but also "where" information, such as a street address, city name, postal code, or geographic coordinates like latitude and longitude. Examples of local searches include "Hong Kong hotels", "Manhattan restaurants", and "Dublin car rental". Local searches exhibit explicit or implicit local intent. A search that includes a location modifier, such as "Bellevue, WA" or "14th arrondissement", is an explicit local search. A search that references a product or service that is typically consumed locally, such as "restaurant" or "nail salon", is an implicit local search.

In web search engines, organic search results are the query results which are calculated strictly algorithmically, and not affected by advertiser payments. They are distinguished from various kinds of sponsored results, whether they are explicit pay per click advertisements, shopping results, or other results where the search engine is paid either for showing the result, or for clicks on the result.

A scraper site is a website that copies content from other websites using web scraping. The content is then mirrored with the goal of creating revenue, usually through advertising and sometimes by selling user data.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Search engine</span> Software system for finding relevant information on the Web

A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages and other relevant information on the Web in response to a user's query. The user inputs a query within a web browser or a mobile app, and the search results are often a list of hyperlinks, accompanied by textual summaries and images. Users also have the option of limiting the search to a specific type of results, such as images, videos, or news.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Images</span> Image search engine by Google Inc.

Google Images is a search engine owned by Google that allows users to search the World Wide Web for images. It was introduced on July 12, 2001, due to a demand for pictures of the green Versace dress of Jennifer Lopez worn in February 2000. In 2011, reverse image search functionality was added.

In Internet marketing, search advertising is a method of placing online advertisements on web pages that show results from search engine queries. Through the same search-engine advertising services, ads can also be placed on Web pages with other published content.

Keyword research is a practice search engine optimization (SEO) professionals use to find and analyze search terms that users enter into search engines when looking for products, services, or general information. Keywords are related to search queries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Facebook Graph Search</span> Semantic search engine by Facebook

Facebook Graph Search was a semantic search engine that Facebook introduced in March 2013. It was designed to give answers to user natural language queries rather than a list of links. The name refers to the social graph nature of Facebook, which maps the relationships among users. The Graph Search feature combined the big data acquired from its over one billion users and external data into a search engine providing user-specific search results. In a presentation headed by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, it was announced that the Graph Search algorithm finds information from within a user's network of friends. Microsoft's Bing search engine provided additional results. In July it was made available to all users using the U.S. English version of Facebook. After being made less publicly visible starting December 2014, the original Graph Search was almost entirely deprecated in June 2019.

Contextual search is a form of optimizing web-based search results based on context provided by the user and the computer being used to enter the query. Contextual search services differ from current search engines based on traditional information retrieval that return lists of documents based on their relevance to the query. Rather, contextual search attempts to increase the precision of results based on how valuable they are to individual users.

Lead validation is the process by which sales leads generated by internet marketing campaigns are separated from other types of conversions. Lead validation is crucial for effective internet marketing management; without it, companies can neither accurately evaluate the results of, nor efficiently improve, their SEO, PPC, display advertising, email, content marketing and social media campaigns.

User intent, otherwise known as query intent or search intent, is the identification and categorization of what a user online intended or wanted to find when they typed their search terms into an online web search engine for the purpose of search engine optimisation or conversion rate optimisation. Examples of user intent are fact-checking, comparison shopping or navigating to other websites.

Local search engine optimization is similar to (national) SEO in that it is also a process affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine's unpaid results often referred to as "natural", "organic", or "earned" results. In general, the higher ranked on the search results page and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users; these visitors can then be converted into customers. Local SEO, however, differs in that it is focused on optimizing a business's online presence so that its web pages will be displayed by search engines when users enter local searches for its products or services. Ranking for local search involves a similar process to general SEO but includes some specific elements to rank a business for local search.

Search engine scraping is the process of harvesting URLs, descriptions, or other information from search engines. This is a specific form of screen scraping or web scraping dedicated to search engines only.

References

  1. ↑ "Measuring the Filter Bubble: How Google is influencing what you click". DuckDuckGo Blog. 2018-12-04. Retrieved 2019-12-04.
  2. ↑ "Google Glossary: Revenge of Mega-SERP". Moz. Retrieved 2016-05-25.
  3. ↑ Oliveira, B.; Teixeira Lopes, C. (2023). "The Evolution of Web Search User Interfaces - An Archaeological Analysis of Google Search Engine Result Pages". Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. pp. 55–68. arXiv: 2301.08613 . doi:10.1145/3576840.3578320.
  4. ↑ Oliveira, B.; Teixeira Lopes, C. (2023). "From 10 Blue Links Pages to Feature-Full Search Engine Results Pages - Analysis of the Temporal Evolution of SERP Features". Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. pp. 338–345. arXiv: 2301.08042 . doi:10.1145/3576840.3578307.
  5. ↑ "How Search algorithms work". Google.
  6. ↑ "Visual Elements gallery of Google Search". Google.
  7. ↑ , Jansen, B. J., and Spink, A. 2004. An Analysis of Documents Viewing Patterns of Web Search Engine Users. In Web Mining: Applications and Techniques. Editor: Anthony Scime. p. 339-354.
  8. ↑ Dean, Brian (27 August 2019). "We Analyzed 5 Million Google Search Results. Here's What We Learned About Organic Click Through Rate". Backlinko.
  9. ↑ "Behavioural Study on the Transparency of Online Platforms" (PDF). European Union. 2018. p. 19. Retrieved 22 April 2021.
  10. ↑ "Enable Search result features for your site".
  11. ↑ Willson, Amelia (20 October 2017). "A Complete List of the Different Types of Featured Snippets".
  12. ↑ "Knowledge – Inside Search – Google". www.google.com. Retrieved 2017-04-04.
  13. ↑ "Bing for Partners helps businesses and developers succeed". www.bing.com. Retrieved 2017-04-04.
  14. ↑ "Enable Search result features for your site | Google Search Central". Google Developers. Retrieved 2021-03-03.
  15. ↑ Cutts, M. (2007) Video: anatomy of a search snippet. Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO.
  16. ↑ "Google Terms of Service – Privacy & Terms – Google". www.google.com. Retrieved 2017-04-04.
  17. ↑ "Google Warns: Automated Queries On Google Is Against The Terms Of Service". seroundtable.com. Retrieved 2017-04-04.
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