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Google’s Candidate Cards Being Tested For Businesses?

A local business has been spotted using the equivalent of Candidate Cards to add content directly into Google's search results.

Matt McGee on March 4, 2016 at 4:12 pm

Move over, Trump, Clinton and the rest of you hopeful presidential candidates. A jeweler in Buffalo, NY, is using what looks like a version of Candidate Cards, part of Google Posts, to show a handful of posts inside a carousel on the first page of Google’s search results.

Postscript: Google has now confirmed this test with us. Rather than read on, see our new article for more information: Google Experimenting With Local Business Cards In Search Results.

Mike Blumenthal spotted the Candidate Cards carousel appearing today on a search for “engagement rings buffalo.” In my testing, that query shows a carousel of posts from Andrews Jewelers on both desktop and mobile. Here’s how it looks on the desktop:

Google announced a product called Candidate Cards in late January to give presidential candidates a chance to add their own content and messages directly on the search results page. The cards are not a paid unit, and candidates can post up to 14,400 characters of text and 10 images/videos per post.

Google’s blog post from January only refers to the feature being available to political candidates and its initial partner, Fox News Channel. Today, Google’s landing page for this “experimental new podium” says that’s still the case, but says that it will expand:

Currently, this feature is an experiment that is only available to the 2016 US presidential candidates. In the future, we plan to make it available to other prominent figures and organizations.

The landing page also shows a logo of a person standing behind a podium with Google’s capital G logo, and in the lower right of the page, that logo is accompanied by the phrase, “Your podium on Google.”

We’ve reached out to Google today to get more information on this, but the company has yet to reply. We’ll update this post if and when that happens. Early last week, when we noticed that the cards were still showing for Fox News, a Google spokesperson told us, “We’re always experimenting with the look and feel of our products but have nothing new to announce.”

About The Author

Matt McGee

Matt McGee joined Third Door Media as a writer/reporter/editor in September 2008. He served as Editor-In-Chief from January 2013 until his departure in July 2017. He can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee.