Thumbnail images in search results -- no work required!

A picture is worth more than a thousand words when it helps search users choose the result they want. With this in mind, some webmasters have gone to a lot of effort providing thumbnails in rich snippets to improve the presentation and usability of their search results pages.  We’re happy to announce that with our latest layout improvement, Custom Search Element users who have not manually added thumbnails will get them without any additional work.

Now, Custom Search crawls your site to find representative images and automatically adds them to your search results snippets.  That’s it. No effort required from you.  Here’s an example of how they improve the search results on Mashable.com:

To learn more about automatic thumbnails (and how to disable them), see our Help Center.

Automatic thumbnails are only available with the Custom Search Element. If you are using an iframe CSE, switch to the Element to ensure that you always have the most up-to-date features.

We hope you and your visitors enjoy this new feature. Early reviews have been positive and we look forward to your feedback.

Posted by Edison Nica, Software Engineer