When you’re waiting for a friend at a restaurant and your mind suddenly turns to a new dish you’ve been thinking of cooking soon, you’ll probably reach for your mobile phone to look for recipes. And while you’d eventually have to click on a site that has a lot of text, your initial search would probably be nicer if you see a more visual search result first. Google is trying to do that exactly as they recently announced that they are introducing a new format for search called “rich cards”.

Basically, rich cards will show you the images in the search results with a summary of the information under it. You can swipe through the results before choosing which link you want to click on. It makes it easier to search for things when you’re on your mobile device since full text may not be that conducive at times. Google is using a schema.org structured markup in order to display “an even more engaging and visual format”.

For now, the rich cards are being pushed out on two categories: movies and recipes. They are still now “actively experimenting” with how publishers will be able to utilize the rich cards in order to get noticed amidst the thousands of search results. Users will also be able to find the information they need much quicker than sorting through all the text results.

For now, the rich cards in the search results is only available for mobile and in the English language only. We’ll find out probably in the next few months if this change will be good for both users and publishers/site owners or if it will only benefit advertisers who will now have a new way of promoting their products but not really giving the results that the users need.

SOURCE: Google