James Carswell, 27 November 2009
We noticed today that Google are now showing extra information on their search results pages in the snippets for LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. For some (but not all) profiles there is now an additional line between the title/headline and the description.
For LinkedIn snippets this gives the person’s location followed by their job title and company. For Facebook snippets this gives location followed by a selection of their friends. If there is no location enetered then a longer list of friends is displayed.
For LinkedIn snippets this gives the person’s location followed by their job title and company. For Facebook snippets this gives location followed by a selection of their friends. If there is no location enetered then a longer list of friends is displayed.
Here’s a screenshot for a search on my name (none of these profiles are actually mine):
Facebook & LinkedIn Google Search Results
It’s good to see Google constantly innovating their SERPs, especially when the changes are as useful as this. I can instantly see that neither the first Facebook entry nor the LinkedIn entry are me. I can imagine this being particularly useful if you’re searching for someone with a very common name, by helping you to find the correct person much more quickly. Cynically, it may also encourage you to do your searching within Google rather than within the Facebook or LinkedIn websites. Nonetheless, let’s hope we see more of this in the future.
UPDATE: This is part of Google’s Rich Snippets feature which is new to the UK, and aims to serve useful at-a-glance information to searchers. The information must be marked up by site owners using micro formats. Another example of its use is to display review information in Google snippets. See the link above for more info.
Source: http://www.periscopix.co.uk/blog/index.php/facebook-linkedin-google-serps/
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