Reading the Search Engine Results Page

We labeled the different parts in  so that we can explain them one by one. (Note that we’re using a Google results page because they get the lion’s share of traffic. Plus, there isn’t much difference between their results page layout and those of Yahoo! and Microsoft Live Search.)

✦ Search Box: The box where you type your search query, or whatever it is that you’re looking for. In this case, it’s roses.

✦ Search Verticals: Links to the vertical search engines, the specialized ones that narrow your search into a specific type of result, such as images or news. Clicking one of these links takes you to a results page with only news or only images.

✦ Page Count: The number of Web pages Google found that match your search query in some way. In this case, it’s a lot.

✦ Time Search Took: How long the search engine took to retrieve your results.

✦ Related Searches: Other topics that contain your query or other searches Google thinks might be relevant.

✦ Images: Picture files that match your query. This comes from Google’s Images vertical engine. Clicking the link would take you to the vertical search results; in this case, a page containing only images of roses.

✦ News Results: Any news results pertaining to your query or containing a keyword. These come from the vertical news engine. Clicking the link would take you to the news page.

✦ Sponsored Links: The paid ads. Note how some of them relate to a specific geographic location near you. This is thanks to the local vertical search engine.

✦ Organic Results: The listing results from a general search of Google’s index, with algorithms applied to determine relevance.

✦ Pagination: Links to the additional pages of results.

✦ Disambiguation: (not pictured) The “Did you mean . . . ?” suggestions that usually displays after a misspelled search query or search queries that turned up very few results. It’s Google trying to guess what you actually wanted. Because [roses] was spelled correctly, no disambiguation appears in . You can test this feature for yourself by searching for [rozes] in Google.