Result Details - a Google Search Experiment

There's a new Google experiment that annotates search results with information about the sites. Most of the information is obtained from Wikipedia articles, but there are a few exceptions.

Here are some examples. Click "Wired (magazine)" next to the search result URL and you'll read an excerpt from the Wikipedia article about Wired. Google also shows if the site is a Webby Award winner.

If you click the similar link placed next to the Google Voice blog, you can read some old information about GrandCentral, which was acquired by Google in 2007. The information is not obtained from a Wikipedia article.

The panels that show result details are quite useful and help you find more information about a site before visiting it. Unfortunately, the site needs to have a Wikipedia article, but that will probably change if the experiment becomes a standard feature.

Google's algorithms that associate pages with entities and Wikipedia articles are not perfect. The result details for google.ca are really funny:

To try this experiment, install a cookie manager extension like "Edit This Cookie" for Chrome, go to google.com and change the value of the NID cookie to:

67=p2QqiMkeBvGpTUoMlME_QMwGVE9LaS3h9FlO1p0kyVOCg9NVW8uNwAKALJalAfhHJweQdt7KDWjpv6P_1vsE-EGlABKpxK8PRUbwwQm2QBm9rZ3rARFBz6lCKcp2KF_x

If you use "Edit This Cookie", don't forget to click "Submit changes". Delete the NID cookie to opt-out from the experiment.

{ via Techno-Net }