Google has launched a new visual elements of Google Search gallery that documents some of the more popular search features in Google Search. Now we no longer have to guess or make up names for some of the Google Search features.
Google started with 22 of these search features, but Google plans to keep adding more. It is broken down as follows:
- 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.
Google starts with the "Anatomy of a Google Search results page" and shows this nice illustration of all those sections above:
Here are the individual elements that Google illustrated:
Attribution:
Text Result:
Image Element:
Video Element:
It is great to have one way of referring to a feature. I often cover features and makeup names as I go. So I suspect I will do that with test features, and then when Google adds them here, we will use Google's naming convention going forward. Again, this will be super helpful for maintaining consistency in writing about these features and discussing different search result features at events or on social.
Also @rustybrick - ha! Google calls them Related Questions which was my point allllll along about SEOs having diff definitions of terms than google does!
— Mordy Oberstein 🇺🇦 (@MordyOberstein) December 13, 2022
I strongly recommend you go through this new document in detail; it even tells you what you can do, if you can do anything, to gain these elements.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
