Just a day after it started embedding its March Madness bracket into its search results, Google today announced that it has made a few more changes to how it displays results for sports-related questions.
League schedules for a number of American sports (with the exception of soccer) are now interactive, for example and grouped by day and week. Clicking on a game brings up more information, including where the game will be played, as well as links to game previews on the league’s official page and the teams’ box offices for buying tickets. Google also says it now exposes more stats about individual players and league standings, but I wasn’t able to trigger them with any of my searches so far.
These redesigned cards, as Google calls these enhanced search results, are now live on desktop, tablet and mobile.
As our own Josh Constine wrote yesterday, adding this kind of information, these features obviously take away some traffic from established sports sites. Search users want answers, however, and, he wrote, ” publishers should seek to succeed through depth, commentary, visualization, analysis, research, and personality, not just SEO.”
