Google testing new ‘Best’ and ‘Research’ product features

 New search results snippets highlights content about Best products and helps searchers further research purchases 

Google has been testing new features to help searchers find the right product.

Similar to their 'top stories' search feature, the new product features serve to highlight content relevant to products that people are searching for. The focus for the current test is on surfacing content about the 'Best' products, and research articles for searchers to read more about the product before buying.

The test was first spotted by Moz SEO guru Dr Pete Meyers, who shared a few screen shots on Twitter:

Individual elements -- #1 "Best" carousel... pic.twitter.com/6sP0BdZ4hO

— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) January 23, 2018

Individual elements -- #2 "Research" 3-pack... pic.twitter.com/3aw7Z6qUQv

— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) January 23, 2018

For a closer look, here is the 'Research' feature for [outdoor grills]:

Perhaps one area for improvement for Google on this is that the first result is a 'top 10' articles that dates back to April 2016. If you are wanting to research a product then seeing the best items from almost two years ago may not be too useful. The third article is from May 2017, so is more recent, but because the website title 'Consumer Reports' is quite long the full date is truncated and not visible to the searcher.

The test is only visible in the US at the moment, and is obviously at its early stages so there is lots of scope for improvement.