After quietly dropping Plus Boxes alongside certain search results, Google openly discussed this new search feature on their official blog.

Google’s Ardan Arac had the honors of posting about those little plus icons we have seen sprinkled through the SERPs. He described the Plus Box as a new search feature offering more information about individual search results.

Presently the Plus Box only shows up when it has the potential to deliver stock information and maps. Those details draw from other Google Services: Finance and Maps. “You won’t see this feature yet for all businesses, but we’re working hard to increase its availability,” Arac wrote.

The company plans to have Plus Boxes associated with other types of search results too. Arac did not list those worthy forthcoming services, but we can guess at what might be part of later Plus Box implementations.

Content from their Book Search service looks like a perfect fit for Plus Box. Someone searching for a line from “Heart Of Darkness” in the regular search would be able to hit a Plus Box under a result, to reveal an extended snippet of the text including the quote.

Tips from Webmaster Central would be a welcome sight for webmasters on the querying prowl. Searching for information on the proper use of URL redirection could turn up a link to Google’s Webmaster Central page about it, with an abbreviated version of the explanation available in the Plus Box.

Perhaps the Plus Box could be a mechanism to get more video into the general search results, without affecting the relatively clean look of a search results page. By placing a relevant video in a Plus Box for a result from a query like “Olympics” puts that content in easy reach of the searcher, while maintaining the integrity of the page that people have come to know.