November 13, 2008 by Matt Thomas
Yesterday I wrote about a tweak Google are experimenting with that would allow variable sizes for search results. It would now seem that that isn’t the only thing Google are experimenting with in terms of search results. People searching for forums may start to see changes too.
On a selective basis, Google is testing an improvement which shows the number of posts, the number of authors and the date of the last post on a forum as part of the search result. The aim is to give searchers a better idea of the quality, or at least the popularity of the forum before they click on the result. It should be a great tool for researchers, allowing them to filter out irrelevant or outdated information.
If you run a forum it’s probably a good idea to keep a close eye on your analytics for the next few weeks. You may start to see changes in your click-through rates; probably a fall in clicks for your older pages, maybe a spike for your newer ones. For the time being though, any changes are likely not to be too pronounced since, as I said, this has not been rolled out properly yet and is only showing upon selected searches. However, in time, this could seriously change things for forum administrators.
Bloggers should be aware too, the rumour is that something like this is also afoot for blogs.
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