An improved search box within the search results

Friday, September 05, 2014

It's been a while since we published this blog post. Some of the information may be outdated (for example, some images may be missing, and some links may not work anymore). The sitelinks search box feature is no longer available.

Today you'll see a new and improved sitelinks search box. When shown, it will make it easier for users to reach specific content on your site, directly through your own site-search pages.

What's this search box and when does it appear for my site?

When users search for a company by name—for example, "Megadodo Publications" or "Dunder Mifflin"—they may actually be looking for something specific on that website. In the past, when our algorithms recognized this, they'd display a larger set of sitelinks and an additional search box below that search result, which let users do site: searches over the site straight from the results, for example site:example.com hitchhiker guides.

This search box is now more prominent (above the sitelinks), supports Autocomplete, and—if you use the right markup—will send the user directly to your website's own search pages.

How can I mark up my site?

You need to have a working site-specific search engine for your site. If you already have one, you can let us know by marking up your home page as a schema.org/WebSite entity with the potentialAction property of the schema.org/SearchAction markup. You can use JSON-LD, microdata, or RDFa to do this; check out the full implementation details in our documentation.

If you implement the markup on your site, users will have the ability to jump directly from the sitelinks search box to your site's search results page. If we don't find any markup, we'll show them a Google search results page for the corresponding site: query, as we've done until now.

As always, if you have questions, you can ask in our Webmaster Help forum.

Update (16:30h CET, September 12th): We're noticing an enthusiastic uptick in the markup implementation after the initial announcement last week! Here are the two main issues we've observed so far, and what you need to do to fix them:

1. Make sure that when you replace the curly braces and all that's inside of it with a search term it leads to a valid URL on your site.

   For example: if your target value is https://www.example.com/search?q={searchTerm}, ensure that https://www.example.com/search?q=foo and https://www.example.com/search?q=bar both lead to search result pages about foo and bar.

2. Make sure that the query-input field points to the same string that's inside the curly braces in the target field.

   For example: if your target value is https://www.example.com/search?q={searchTerm}, you must use searchTerm as the name within query-input.

Posted by Mariya Moeva, Webmaster Trends Analyst, and Kaylin Spitz, Software Engineer