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A search engine results page (SERP) is a
webpage A web page (or webpage) is a Web document that is accessed in a web browser. A website typically consists of many web pages linked together under a common domain name. The term "web page" is therefore a metaphor of paper pages bound together in ...
that is displayed by a
search engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...
in response to a query by a user. The main component of a SERP is the listing of results that are returned by the search engine in response to a keyword query. The results are of two general types: *
organic search In web search engines, organic search results are the query results which are calculated strictly algorithmically, and not affected by advertiser payments. They are distinguished from various kinds of sponsored results, whether they are explicit pa ...
: retrieved by the search engine's algorithm; * sponsored search: advertisements. The results are normally ranked by
relevance Relevance is the connection between topics that makes one useful for dealing with the other. Relevance is studied in many different fields, including cognitive science, logic, and library and information science. Epistemology studies it in gener ...
to the query. Each result displayed on the ''SERP'' normally includes a title, a link that points to the actual page on the
Web Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...
, and a short
description Description is any type of communication that aims to make vivid a place, object, person, group, or other physical entity. It is one of four rhetorical modes (also known as ''modes of discourse''), along with exposition, argumentation, and narr ...
, known as a snippet, showing where the keywords have matched content within the page for organic results. For sponsored results, the advertiser chooses what to display. A single search query can yield many pages of results. However, in order to avoid overwhelming users, search engines and personal preferences often limit the number of results displayed per page. As a result, subsequent pages may not be as relevant or ranked as highly as the first. Just like the world of traditional print media and its
advertising Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a Product (business), product or Service (economics), service. Advertising aims to present a product or service in terms of utility, advantages, and qualities of int ...
, this enables competitive pricing for page real estate but is complicated by the dynamics of consumer expectations and intent— unlike static print media where the content and the advertising on every page are the same all of the time for all viewers, despite such hard copy being localized to some degree, usually geographic, like state, metro-area, city, or
neighbourhood A neighbourhood (Commonwealth English) or neighborhood (American English) is a geographically localized community within a larger town, city, suburb or rural area, sometimes consisting of a single street and the buildings lining it. Neighbourh ...
, search engine results can vary based on individual factors such as browsing habits.


Components

The organic search results, queries, and
advertisements Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to present a product or service in terms of utility, advantages, and qualities of interest to consumers. It is typically us ...
are the three main components of the ''SERP'', However, the ''SERP'' of major search engines, like
Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
,
Yahoo! Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...
,
Bing Bing most often refers to: * Bing Crosby (1903–1977), American singer * Microsoft Bing, a web search engine Bing may also refer to: Food and drink * Bing (bread), a Chinese flatbread * Bing (soft drink), a UK brand * Bing cherry, a varie ...
, Brave Search, and
Sogou Sogou, Inc. () is a Chinese technology company and subsidiary of Tencent. The offices of Sogou are located in Beijing on the southeast corner of Tsinghua University. Sogou also has offices in Chengdu, co-located within Tencent's office build ...
may include many different types of enhanced results (
organic search In web search engines, organic search results are the query results which are calculated strictly algorithmically, and not affected by advertiser payments. They are distinguished from various kinds of sponsored results, whether they are explicit pa ...
, and sponsored) such as rich snippets, images, maps, definitions, answer boxes, videos or suggested search refinements. A study revealed that 97% of queries in Google returned at least one rich feature. Another study on the evolution of SERPs interfaces from 2000 to 2020 shows that SERP are becoming more diverse in terms of elements, aggregating content from different verticals and including more features that provide direct answers.


Search query

Also known as 'user search string', this is the word or set of words that are typed by the user in the search bar of the search engine. The search box is located on all major search engines like
Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
,
Yahoo Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, an ...
,
Bing Bing most often refers to: * Bing Crosby (1903–1977), American singer * Microsoft Bing, a web search engine Bing may also refer to: Food and drink * Bing (bread), a Chinese flatbread * Bing (soft drink), a UK brand * Bing cherry, a varie ...
, Brave Search, and
Sogou Sogou, Inc. () is a Chinese technology company and subsidiary of Tencent. The offices of Sogou are located in Beijing on the southeast corner of Tsinghua University. Sogou also has offices in Chengdu, co-located within Tencent's office build ...
. Users indicate the topic desired based on the keywords they enter into the search box in the search engine.


Organic results

Organic SERP listings are the natural listings generated by
search engines Search engines, including web search engines, selection-based search engines, metasearch engines, desktop search tools, and web portals and vertical market websites have a search facility for online databases. By content/topic Gene ...
, they list webpages matching the query. The pages are sorted on a relevance score based on a series of metrics generally based upon factors such as quality and relevance of the content, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness of the website and author on a given topic, good
user experience User experience (UX) is how a user interacts with and experiences a product, system or service. It includes a person's perceptions of utility, ease of use, and efficiency. Improving user experience is important to most companies, designers, a ...
, and
backlink From the point of view of a given web resource (referent), a backlink is a regular hyperlink on another web resource (the referrer) that points to the referent. A ''web resource'' may be (for example) a website, web page, or web directory. A ba ...
s. Each of the matching web pages is presented as a visual element composed of attribution, a title link, and a snippet of the matching webpage showing how the query matched on the page. Search results pages typically contain numerous organic results, and users tend to view only the first results on the first page.


Sponsored results

Several major search engines offer "sponsored results" to companies, who may pay the search engine to have their products or services appear above other search hits. This is often done in the form of bidding between companies, where the highest bidder gets the top result. A 2018 report from the European Commission showed that consumers generally avoid these top results, as there is an expectation that the topmost results on a search engine page will be sponsored, and thus less relevant.


Rich snippets

Rich snippets are displayed by
Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
in the search results pages when a website contains content in structured data markup. Structured data markup helps the Google algorithm to index and understand the content better. Google supports rich snippets for various data types, including products, recipes, reviews, events, news articles, and job postings.


Featured snippets

A featured snippet is a summary of an answer to a user's query. This snippet appears at the top of the list of search hits. Google supports the following types of featured snippets: Paragraph Featured Snippet, Numbered List Featured Snippet, Bulleted List Featured Snippet, Table Featured Snippet,
YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...
Featured Snippet, Carousel Snippet, Double Featured Snippet, and Two-for-One Featured Snippet.


Knowledge graph

Search engines like
Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
, Bing,
Sogou Sogou, Inc. () is a Chinese technology company and subsidiary of Tencent. The offices of Sogou are located in Beijing on the southeast corner of Tsinghua University. Sogou also has offices in Chengdu, co-located within Tencent's office build ...
have started to expand their data into
Encyclopedia An encyclopedia is a reference work or compendium providing summaries of knowledge, either general or special, in a particular field or discipline. Encyclopedias are divided into article (publishing), articles or entries that are arranged Alp ...
and other rich sources of information. Google for example calls this sort of information "
Google Knowledge Graph The Google Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base from which Google serves relevant information in an infobox beside its search results. This allows the user to see the answer in a glance, as an instant answer. The data is generated automatical ...
", if a search query matches it will display an additional sub-window on right-hand side with information from its sources. Such panels may offer the user a
zero-click result A zero-click result is the successful resolution of a web query when the user gets their desired result immediately on the search engine results page without having to navigate to any followup source of information. Conventional pageview tracki ...
to their query.


Google Discover

Google Discover formerly known as Google Feed is a way of getting topics and news information to users on the homepage below the search box.


Generation

Major search engines like
Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...
,
Yahoo! Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...
,
Bing Bing most often refers to: * Bing Crosby (1903–1977), American singer * Microsoft Bing, a web search engine Bing may also refer to: Food and drink * Bing (bread), a Chinese flatbread * Bing (soft drink), a UK brand * Bing cherry, a varie ...
,
Sogou Sogou, Inc. () is a Chinese technology company and subsidiary of Tencent. The offices of Sogou are located in Beijing on the southeast corner of Tsinghua University. Sogou also has offices in Chengdu, co-located within Tencent's office build ...
primarily use content contained within the page and fallback to
metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...
tags of a
web page A web page (or webpage) is a World Wide Web, Web document that is accessed in a web browser. A website typically consists of many web pages hyperlink, linked together under a common domain name. The term "web page" is therefore a metaphor of pap ...
to generate the content that makes up a search snippet. Generally, the
HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...
title tag will be used as the title of the snippet while the most relevant or useful contents of the web page ( description tag or page copy) will be used for the description.


Scraping and automated access

Search engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...
result pages are protected from automated access by a range of defensive mechanisms and terms of service. These result pages are the primary data source for
Search engine optimization Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of Web traffic, website traffic to a website or a web page from web search engine, search engines. SEO targets unpaid search traffic (usually referred to as ...
, the website placement for competitive keywords that has become an important field of business and interest. The process of harvesting search engine result pages data is usually called "
search engine scraping Search engine scraping is the process of harvesting URLs, descriptions, or other information from search engines. This is a specific form of screen scraping or web scraping dedicated to search engines only. Most commonly larger search engine opt ...
" or in a general form "
web crawling Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing (''web spider ...
" and generates the data SEO-related companies need to evaluate website competitive organic and sponsored rankings. This data can be used to track the position of websites and show the effectiveness of SEO as well as keywords that may need more SEO investment to rank higher. There is no evidence of Google making any public announcement as to the practice of scraping being in breach of its terms of service, as previously documented in this section, as any such 'warnings' could not, by their nature, apply universally to its users as well as, say, users in countries where Google does not operate, nor would they be capable of applying to a private individual in the same way as they do to one of Google's Ad Partners. Further, crawling itself remains one of the core elements of Google's search functionality and tools; purported 'warnings' against scraping previously attributed to Google, were in reality posts on third-party platforms such as
Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...
that were manifestly by individuals not necessarily associated with or employed by Google, and in any event made in a personal capacity alone, rather than in a Google-endorsed formal capacity.


See also

*
User intent User intent, also known as query intent or search intent, is the identification and categorization of what a user online intended or wanted to find when they typed their search terms into an online web search engine for the purpose of search eng ...
*
Search engine optimization Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of Web traffic, website traffic to a website or a web page from web search engine, search engines. SEO targets unpaid search traffic (usually referred to as ...
*
List of Search Engines Search engines, including web search engines, selection-based search engines, metasearch engines, desktop search tools, and web portals and vertical market websites have a search facility for online databases. By content/topic General ...
* https://www.google.com/search?q=SERP he Google SERP for "SERP"


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Search Engine Results Page Search engine optimization Internet search engines Internet terminology Digital marketing