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Comment by umaar | Hacker News Reader

Generally, I like the 'rich snippets' feature, but I think they've gotten worse.

For example here's a reddit post I made from 6 years ago showcasing a search for 'mac shortcut screenshot' https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/1ou4i0/a_search_for...

It's extremely clear, and results in minimal cognitive effort in parsing the result.

Here's the result now: https://i.imgur.com/A726Dhw.png

There's so much more cruft:

- 4x low resolution screenshots which I initially thought were related to ads

- An extra URL

- Multi-step instructions

- Lots of extra words

- Bold formatting has been applied inconsistently

Seeing the text: "Command + Shift + 3" in big bold letters was great, but it's now changed into something else.

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I can think of two reasons that they might think the new version is better:

- The new snippet might be more useful to a majority of the people searching. It shows you the keys on the keyboard, it explains how to input it instead of relying on knowing the shortened notation, and it tells you where the screenshot will go. Since I don't use a mac myself, I feel like I've learned more from the latter than from the former.

- As you can see in the other reply to this comment, the new info box can pull info from any page with a numbered list of instructions. I don't know how the earlier info was extracted, but if you're going to pull out instructions like this for more queries about more complicated tasks, then it's better to be consistent, even if it could be expressed in a single bullet point.

I also find it funny that the source link is far more prominent in the newer rich snippet, even though a lot of people in this thread are saying they've made it harder to find.

Turns out Google has been doing this for my own site on certain pages. If I search for:

devtools capture element screenshot

It has listed the exact instructions on the search results page: https://i.imgur.com/NTdDjZY.png

Can I get an outsider perspective, are those 4 list items shown in the rich snippet too many? Is it too wordy? I'm wondering if a single item which said:

Search for screenshot in the Command Menu (Cmd + Shift + P)

Would be better?

I think it's fine. I'm not a webdev but I could follow your current instructions easily. I would definitely consider your instructions a good result if I was looking for the answer.

Although I prefer the second (wordier) example in OPs case anyway.

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