Google Goes Beyond Answers, Starts Guessing Release Dates

Mar 18, 2011 at 4:55pm ET by Matt McGee

Google can answer a lot of searches without needing to send you to another web site. If you’re looking for weather, sports scores or local movie schedules, Google probably has a “one box” for you.

As Engadget noticed today, Google has added a one box even when it only has a “best guess” at the answer to your search.

Searches for movie and video game release dates are now showing what Google thinks is the best answer based on info that it finds on various websites. As you can see in the image above, just use the name of the movie or game and add “release date” to the query to get search results like this. Google shows what it thinks the release date will be and lists the sources it used.

This doesn’t appear to work on search for books or albums. We have an email in to Google asking for confirmation about what types of queries are included, and we’ll update this if/when we get a reply.

Update: A Google spokesperson tells us this feature is not limited to movies and video games (or any other type of query), but “we won’t show the feature unless we have enough high quality sites corroborating the answer.” It uses Google Squared technology.

About The Author: Matt McGee is Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. You can read Matt's disclosures on his personal blog. See more articles by Matt McGee

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http://www.periscopix.co.uk spoonman

The Google Squared results still aren’t always great. Try doing a search on President of Mexico. Google thinks it’s Vicente Fox.
http://www.gamerstube.com Joe Youngblood

so google uses farmer/panda to attack scraper sites, but scrapes release dates from ‘high quality’ sites? i would be upset if they were stealing my data and lowering my organic traffic.