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Google results now showing post counts and content insight

Monday, November 3rd, 2008

I’m not the first to notice this, but it looks like Google is playing with attaching some content insight into it’s search results. Search results for ScribbleLive liveblogs now have a little gray line of text under the title that says something like, “48 posts – Last post: 12 Aug.” They must be looking for repeating dates in the content, checking for a repeating HTML structure, and extracting the information. Very neat, indeed, Google :) I’m sure Matt would point-out that this is another benefit of using XHTML standards (or close to them).

It kinda reminds me of a website I built in university called @Pad. It pulled the latest course news off websites by looking for dates in the format “##/##/#### ##:##”. It then grabbed whatever was the to the right of it. I might do the same for ScribbleLive one day to scrape in liveblogs from regular websites. Ya know, if I have a day to kill ;)