Over the years, Google has continually improved how search results are shown with things like cards for important figures and businesses, highlights, sports data, and lot more.
Now as announced in a blog post the tech giants Google, is updating the way it displays table data in search results, which should make it easier to find the information you’re specifically looking for. The idea is to make it easier to discover the data that a lot of these organisations produce and then surface it in an easy to read format on the company’s search results pages.
The company is currently working with a few news organisations, like ProPublica, to produce the structured data in the format it needs for its search index. As long as that data is in a table, adding it to the index should be straightforward.
Google News Lab’s Simon Rogers wrote in today’s blog post.
“Data journalism takes many forms, and it’s not always clear from the headline that there is potentially useful data within that document or story,” also “It isn’t always easy for Google Search to detect and understand tables of data to surface the most relevant results.”He added.
Scott Klein, Deputy Managing Editor at ProPublica, commented on the improved presentation of relevant information as part of search results, noting:
“As a news organisation that is focused on having real-world impact, it’s very much in our mission to give people information at the point of need. If we can make the data we’ve worked hard to collect and prepare available to people at the very moment when they’re researching a big life decision, and thereby help them make the best decision they can, it’s an absolute no-brainer for us. And the code is trivial to add.
The feature is currently in a testing phase. But will be rolling out soon. So search results may not frequently turn up in datasets just yet. However developers can look into how to make their datasets more discoverable here.
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