Google and Forums

[lucy24]

Did I miss an announcement?

While preparing to post this-and-that in the SSID subforum, I did the usual WebmasterWorld search to see if the specific robots had been discussed before. What I get, predictably, is a list of Forums topics--but now each one includes a line from three individual posts (always exactly three), with a “More” link leading directly to the quoted post.

How long have they been doing this?

[not2easy]

From the title, I'll guess that the Google option was selected. I just tried it and it is peculiar what they are returning. Can I guess that they are having trouble training AI to be helpful around here?

[JesterMagic]

No it has been going on for maybe 2 or 3 years but you don't see a lot of it. I've posted about it before thinking at the time that Google should do something like this for other search results as well, for example searches on brand names where they could list the main search result which would be the website of the brand and then for example underneath their main social media page, links to their apps, etc. This would reduce the clutter in the search results and put all the main official sources of info in one result. Google does do this now but on a grander scale (not necessarily better though) for the big brands/companies with the knowledge panel widget.

My site does have a number of forum posts listed in the search results that lists the main search result with link, followed by the breadcrumb of the topic, followed by 3 or 4 other related forum topics right underneath with links that also list the number of posts in the topic (which is never correct) and the date each topic was started. At the bottom of the same search result it also has a link which says "More results from www.example.com".

[not2easy]

Maybe I have misunderstood the topic here, it appeared to me that this was in regards to the site:search using Google, not serps.

[lucy24]

site:search using Google, not serps

Isn't it the same thing? Obviously you’d see more of it if you constrain your search to a site that happens to be primarily a forum. But it was weird for me because I use site search regularly--every time I'm asking about a robot I begin by looking up earlier discussions of it--and I'm positive I have never seen this format before. (Not logged-in to G, if that makes any difference.)

Wonder who decided it’s intuitively obvious that “More” = “take me to this post”.