Google Enhancing Search Results for Forums ?

I just noticed that Google is adding a strip of info which includes the number of posts, number of post authors, and the time/date of the last post to the top of search results pointing to forum threads/posts.

So far I've seen it for VBullitin and phpBB3 forums, including Ozzu.



Anyone else seeing this ?

I see that for some ... but not all ... it looks like they need to be a little older or something like that ... like for this one I do, but for this one I don't

Interesting! I like it ... but yeah, seems only to be showing for those a little older.

I think it's a matter of some pages getting crawled by the new crawler sooner than others.

I found this thread started & last-posted on Sept. 29th of 2008 on this page of results.

Here's another result from Oct. 2nd of 2008

You're right, hadn't seen it before looks like its more than forums which have been enhanced though, they are also putting a last update in there for some sites, appears to be mainly bloggs but I didn't look very far just thought I'd have a look after reading your post

Google must be giving some kind of preference to old content and old topics.

It's a neat feature, I'll give it that, but I wonder how many people are really going to use the extra metainfo in the search results. Personally I seem to skip right over stuff like that; I decide on which results to explore based on mostly the title and only the title of the page.

I'm immediately drawn to light gray text on a white background out of habbit. It's a lot of times something important that someone doesn't want you to see but they're required to put there.

DP has something similar next to thread titles which shows you the age of the thread in days & I look at that too.

It does show form links, but not all of them it shows some of them.