Tag Archives: search

Google Search to Include Thumbnail Images?

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So I was doing a random search on our site and noticed that Google now began including thumbnail images in custom search results. An example:

Google search results with thumbnail images

I tried a similar search on Google’s main search engine, but the thumbnails didn’t show, so I’m guessing it’s something they’re experimenting on custom search and may or may not bring to their main search engine in the future.

At first I thought Google had some deeper integration with WordPress, since the results only seemed to show thumbnails for my blog results. But I’ve noticed a small amount of pages on our main site also had a thumbnail images (as the 1st search result above shows).

As you probably noticed, some of those images are obviously wrong and the purpose of this post is to see if anyone knows what Google is keying off of or if we can provide better guidance as to what the thumbnail image should be. The rest of the internet seems to refer to the image_src link tag for thumbnail guidance, but Google doesn’t appear to be using that.

<link rel="image_src" href="http://static.hd-trailers.net/images/the-darkest-hour-8f0-4aa2fcd932500-poster.jpg" />

If anyone has any idea, I’m all ears!

Update: Found the answer: Custom Search Help: Specify thumbnails

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It’s been awhile since I posted about any developments on this site. Work has kept me quite busy.

I’ve been fooling around with ads, as you probably have noticed (unless of course you use AdBlocker). Anyway, I still don’t quite like the layout nor the annoying flashing gif animations. I’ll be experimenting with text only ads and see how they fare. Before you ask me why I’ve opted for AdBrite and not Google Adsense, lets just say that Google Adsense doesn’t like this site for some reason, as my application was rejected without any explanation.

The “All Trailers” link has been moved from the bottom of the index pages to the top to make it more discoverable.

I’ve also received many requests to add a search engine for this site. As always, you were able to search for trailers using the built-in WordPress search engine. I do have plans to write one up and even supporting auto-complete. However for now, I just added a search box in the upper right hand corner that does an in-site search of hd-trailers.net via Google.

Also, there has been a request to label trailers with genre tags, which I’ve begun to. I’ve just been copying genre information from IMDb and adding them to the category list.