engine - Thanks. That's a fascinating page... a striking example of a well-organized serps page (or a well-organized information page of any kind). I assume that it's taking advantage of (or will take advantage of) some of the capabilities of Caffeine, which is purported to be able to index different media types quickly over time.
For those who haven't seen it, or who will see a different page as the display changes over time (which I'm thinking it's designed to do)...
Under the search box, the page is displaying the following pre-games information. The related searches and the display are clearly timeline related, at the moment anticipating the games....
138,000,000 results (0.14 seconds)
Related searches: world cup predictions - - world cup opening ceremony 2010
Football in South Africa
Kickoff in 2 days! First matches:
etc...
etc...
The first matches are then listed below... with opposing teams, their appropriate national flags, and game start times.
Below these, most striking to me, is a tabular display of the groups of teams (A through H) displayed by country and flags... then followed by organic serps, with Universal news, video, and images distributed within the serps.
One wonders what's algorithmically chosen and what's human-edited. I'm guessing algorithm to an extent that would surprise us, very likely with some initial pre-templating that Google will use annually. Or perhaps it's a modular system that's adaptable to similar competitive events. I checked various current US pro-basketball and baseball searches... nothing quite this elaborate, yet.
It will be very interesting to see how Google chooses to evolve this display over time, not just for the games, but also for other sporting events. I assume for the World Cup that once the games have started we'll get real-time Twitter results, etc, during the course of play.
This page, along with some major destination style Google Place Pages, is the closest I've seen to the kind of page I thought Eric Schmidt was anticipating in the course of last year's TechCrunch interview on the future of Google Search...
Eric Schmidt on the Future of Google Search http
://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3984839.htm
[
webmasterworld.com...]
I suggested in our discussion
"that Google's attempt is to diversify, not to get simplistic about serps it returns for a query". If anything, I felt, concerns should be much more about data aggregation than about Truth compressed into a single sentence. There's a lot of data aggregated here.
It will be interesting to see how much Google gets into this kind of display. I anticipate more coming. From the user's point of view, I think this page is superb, and, in this case at least, I think there's a definite symbiosis between Google and the data creators.
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 7:46 pm (utc) on Jun 9, 2010]
