Why Doesn’t Google Show favicons in Search Results?
Just wondering. Thats all.
I guess showing an image for each search result would be be a majorly intensive operation. But Google seems to have a knack at those kinds of things.
I was pondering this thought after ‘recognising’ a particular book that has kept on ‘coming back at me’ during the my last few ‘book search missions’ on amzon and other sites. If there had not been an image of the book cover , perhaps i would not have noticed that it was a recurring item that I had previously disregarded. After thorough inspection, that book is now in my shopping cart.
It made me think - what if Google showed favicons in search results?
It would mean that i would be able to recgonise sites that kept recurring in my searches and be able to make a milisecond judgements (based on ’seeing images’) on that knowledge rather than having to go through the labourious task of, slightly longer, judgements based on ‘reading text’.
Also, us webmasters might might be prompted to get our act together and make a good effort to provide a decent favicon. Just as how the “untitled” header made us ensure that we always added a title to our web pages. Remember those search results in the days of 2000? How many “untitled” pages do you see in your results nowadays.
Any way , just some musings.
Update
I guess i should learn to read stuff before i write… looks like google have already been testing this idea…not sure if they thought it was a good or bad idea though…
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/019275.html
Which points to a thread discussing this issue:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?fid=706394d9310db0200004615e65126e1a&hl=en
One good reason not to show favicons in the SERPs is that one site could spoof another’s favicon. Thus, misleading the ‘milli-second’ decision process and making searching harder and more confusing.
However Google’s spam filtering crew at Gmail have mastered the art of understanding images - so praps that’s an issue that could get solved one day. Add spoofing/indecent favicons to the list of bad-egg/black-hat techniques and you’re away again.