The results templates out-of-the-box

We’ve been hard at work making improvements to the Google Custom Search Element that will enhance the look and feel of search results when users type into your custom search query box. You’ll see some of the fruits of these labors starting today. We’ve just launched a set of templates that take advantage of rich snippets markup to provide customized results layouts for specific structured data. Your markup can enhance the display of structured information in addition to enabling the powerful metadata features, such as Sort by Attribute and Restrict to Range that we released last year.

For example, there’s a Review template that will show ratings and expand on-demand to display reviews within a result as shown in the screenshot below:

This specific treatment is used when you use hreview and hreview-aggregate Microformat markup on your pages. Template rendering changes are automatic if you use the Element.

Templates that we now support include: People, Product, Recipe, Organization, Review and Review Aggregate. Try these out at our demo search site. Here’s an example of a Recipe result, using a custom theme.

For more information on markup that you can use for Google.com and Custom Search, please refer to our documentation. Don’t forget that we also support image thumbnails and actions. Further, if you are marking up your pages, you can verify that we recognize the right attributes by using our Rich Snippets Preview Tool.

We are constantly adding support for additional markup formats, so stay tuned. We’re continuing to add innovative features to the Element to help you turbo-charge your Custom Search results presentation.

Hunting for the Megalithic Stone Circle in Morocco

Over the past few years, we’ve seen some great discoveries in Google Earth, including some quite remarkable finds that were only made possible thanks to the widespread high-resolution imagery that is available in Google Earth.

Some examples include a geologist that “accidentally” discovered a meteor crater, another crater in the Saharan Desert, and a buried Peruvian pyramid.

Today we bring you the story of Graham Salisbury, and how he was able to track down the megalithic stone circle of Mzora using a black and white photograph and Google Earth.

mzoura01.jpg

Salisbury quotes several sources as saying it’s “extraordinarily difficult to find” and “one would have to have access to a military satellite to find it“, but he felt that it could be found in Google Earth with enough research and patience.

You can read all of the details on his blog, but he did an excellent job of figuring out which area to search and then tracking down. If you compare the screenshot from Google Earth below with the black and white image above, I think it’s pretty clear that he succeeded.

mzora-ge.jpg

If you’d like to see it for yourself, you can fly there using this KML file.