Live Sports Socres In Universal Search
The baseball season has just begun, being that I am a big fan of the New York Yankees, I did a quick search today for yankees in google. Here is what I got.
I am pretty sure that google has been showing sports scores in the search results. But today I noticed two new things that I have not seen in the past.
- Google is displaying in box score during the game, which means that they are fetching the data from mlb.com, probably via API, although I am not sure.
- Google added a link “add to iGoogle”, right next to the box score, which takes you to a sports scores gadget.
This comes to no surprise especially after this weekend when we learned that google has been talking to twitter about crawling their site better so that google can display live results from twitter. Google is into freshness and keeping their index as up to date as possible with the latest information. In addition, by keeping the score and the box score in the SERP’s, this allaws the searcher to remain on google’s site a bit longer and maybe click on an ad before leaving to a different website.
Have you seen an “add to iGoogle” link before in the google SERP’s? Is google displaying it anywhere else?