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Google Search Direct Search Results Start Rolling Out on Mobile, Hide Web Results for Certain Queries

Google Search Direct Search Results Start Rolling Out on Mobile, Hide Web Results for Certain Queries

By Ankit Chawla | Updated: 26 November 2018 18:28 IST

Google provides an “Show all results” link at the bottom of the same results page

Highlights

The feature was in testing back in March 2018
Only “extremely high confidence” answers will be shown
Some tweaks have been made

Google Search is now getting direct search results on mobile for certain phrases on both Android and iOS. The feature has been silently rolled out by Google and users are already seeing it on in their search results. The tech giant has decided to hide all search results, altogether, from below its own answer to certain queries. Instead, Google provides an “Show all results” link at the bottom of the same results page. The tech giant says that this custom page is shown only when it has high confidence - mostly when the results are absolute in nature.

Direct search results on Google Search are not new to the platform. Back in March this year, Google Search had started showing answers for certain queries, without displaying the Web search results. However, this feature was soon removed citing issues with accuracy. Google has now gone ahead and officially rolled out direct results widely.

In a statement to Search Engine Land, Google confirmed the development. “As always, our goal with search is to help people quickly find the most relevant information. For queries where we have extremely high confidence that a user is seeking a calculation, unit conversion or local time, we will show a single result to improve load time on mobile. Since our initial experiment in February, we worked to remove ads and improve the triggering quality for this experience to be sure that we're serving users what they're looking for, and we will still provide the option to tap to see more results.”

We have independently confirmed that Google Search indeed shows only answers for queries like “time in India”, conversions like “1 kg to lbs”, and maths problems like “5+5”. An additional tab is shown below the answer, which lets you add a question of your choice to allow online publishers to get back to you with an answer.

The Search Engine Land report notes that some of the query results have been tweaked slightly. For instance, if you search for the phrase - “time in new york” - it will show all top results considering some users might be wanting to search for The New York Times portal.

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