Interesting format in Google results

[lorio]

Recently I was checking the Google rankings of one of my company websites by some of the keywords that we are receiving traffic from. I just manually searched the keywords in Google and viewed the results. I found an interesting format that I have not seen before. For instance, I searched "women's college" (using no surrounding quotes in my search" and our website "www.californiacollegesearch.com" was the top position on page one. However, the results looked different than all the other results below it:

Trinity College — Women: 100%
According to http://www.californiacollegesearch.c...francisco.html - More sources »

When I clicked on "More sources >>" link, there were a few more listings from our website.

I tried this same experiment with the key phrase "national hispanic university" and here is the top ranked result:

National University — Hispanic: 16%
According to http://www.californiacollegesearch.c...niversity.html - More sources »

Does anyone know why these search results are given a different results format than the rest of the results on the page? They each end with a percentage, and where normally you would see the meta description tag of the website, it says "According to http://..." and then the link to "More sources >>"

I have never seen this before and I spoke with my SEO coworker and he had not seen this either. Any ideas as to what this means and why our site is formatted this way in the Google results?

[greeneagle]

welcome to WPW lorio,

I checked your examples and came up with "Not Found" in both instances. Would you care to repost examples, or did I miss something?

Thanks,

Ken

[lorio]

Sorry about the "file not found" links greeneagle. I am relatively new with this company so I don't yet know all the ins and outs of our sites!

I am guessing that some of those "file not found" pages that are coming up in the results are schools that have been removed from our database. Since those pages are dynamically generated they will eventually fall out of Google's index.

I went ahead and clicked "More Sources >>" in the Google result listing for each search term and did find one good link in each. Check out these pages:

http://www.uscollegesearch.org/national-university.html

http://www.uscollegesearch.org/trini...ashington.html


I can see that Google is pulling content from those pages and using in the search result that it is showing - hence the Trinity College - Women 100%, as this statistic is found in the content of our page.

Any insight into why Google is formatting the search result using this info (and the "according to http://..." and "more sources >>") is most welcome.

By the way let me clarify that I am not complaining about this! #1 rankings in Google are much appreciated. just trying to find the meaning behind the format used...

[incrediblehelp]

Maybe your talking about Google Sitelinks?

[wallphone]

Its not sitelinks. It appears to be an attempt by google to extract some semantic meaning from the content of the page.

In this case, Google is stating that enrollment of women at trinity college is 100%, and your site is listed as a source of this fact.

[boltz]

It looks like it a Q&A result - http://www.google.com/help/features.html#qna. Google offers "quick" answers to certain questions. They seem to test these, as some answers I have found in the past no longer appear. A similar Q&A result:
http://www.google.com/search?q=elevation+everest

[UCSI]

I think he is talking about this - never seen this before neither - or at least didn't notice...

[/yahoo]

[UCSI]

tis is the weirdest thing - the percentage almost never shows up - I tried all kinds of combinations of phrases - does anyone know why and when those results appear?

[lorio]

Thanks boltz! I think that is it. That makes the most sense after reading the Google Q&A definition.

Interesting service offered by Google...I did do a few other tests on that and I didn't get the same formatted results. It must not be too savvy yet...