Since Google announced passage indexing (ranking) many assumed they would look different in the search results. But no, they won't look any different according to Danny Sullivan of Google. Danny told me on Twitter that passage indexing "doesn't change the look of results."
Why did some of us, including me at some point, think the passage indexing based results would look different? Well, the original Google announcement shared this screen shot of what it will look like:
This is how Google captioned it, "with new passage understanding capabilities, Google can understand that the specific passage (R) is a lot more relevant to a specific query than a broader page on that topic (L)."
I asked Danny about that and he said "that's a bad illustration because it compares a regular snippet with a featured snippet. Any regular listing that becomes a featured snippet right now -- without passage ranking -- looks like that."
In short, passage indexing is purely about ranking. It won't look or appear different, it just will rank pages that previously Google did not rank because Google is able to understand content better deeper within the content of longer web pages. And no, passage indexing is not yet live and probably won't be in 2020.
Here is the stream of tweets about how passage indexing won't look or feel different in the search results interface than normal snippets:
Will passage indexing ranked search result snippets look any different from normal snippets?
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) December 29, 2020
Why would they? It's like asking if link analysis results look different. Or if BERT analysis looks different. It's just another ranking factor. It doesn't change the look of results.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) December 29, 2020
That's a bad illustration because it compares a regular snippet with a featured snippet. Any regular listing that becomes a featured snippet right now -- without passage ranking -- looks like that.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) December 29, 2020
Yeah, I can understand that. Not the best way for us to have illustrated it. Well, for ordinary people, it was probably fine. For SEOs, I can see and understand they're seeing a display difference and interpreting that in a way we didn't intend.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) December 29, 2020
Passage ranking has nothing to do with display. It's simply another ranking mechanism we will use to identify pages best relevant for a search.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) December 29, 2020
For granular control over display, use nosnippet, where this entire discussion started. It's very granular: https://t.co/v3msKJMQGC
With nosnippet, you can choose to only allow a single word to be displayed, if that's what you want. Or only particular words. We'll still *index* the entire page to understand if it's relevant to show, but we wouldn't display things that are marked as nosnippet.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) December 29, 2020
This is all why the nosnippet tag won't influence passage indexing results.
Also, so you know, there has been speculation about the scroll to text and highlight feature that we see on featured snippets would be a good place for this to work on passage indexing. Yes, we know it is just about ranking but if Google shows a result and links the searcher to a page with a huge amount of content, it would make sense for the searcher to be anchored to the right place on the page. This is how Danny responded to me on that question:
I mean, I think you only use that feature for featured snippets. when you click on an FS, it can anchor you and highlight the portion of the FS source on that web page. It might make sense to do that with passage indexing if those pages are super long.
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) December 29, 2020
We already have existing systems that determine what is best to *display* to help people understand how a page might be relevant to their search. Maybe (or maybe not) we might do in-page jumping as with featured snippets, but that's not part of passage ranking.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) December 29, 2020
And just to be clear, Danny has been saying this for over two months now:
It's not going to look any different. It's just a way to better identify web pages that are relevant to a query. The way we show relevant pages now? Still the same if we show a page based on improved ranking technology.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) October 22, 2020
Forum discussion at Twitter.
