Whenever you search for something on Google, Google will show you a list of results in its results page, each result having several elements. As it may not be obvious what each of these elements mean at first glance, in this article we'll learn a little about them.
Note: Google may change the design of its results in the future, and it may even use different designs for different portions of its users (a practice called A/B testing), so the result may not actually look like the above for you. However, most elements will probably remain the same. Other search engines, like Bing and DuckDuckGo, also have a similar anatomy for their search results, so what you learn here will apply to them as well.
Name of the Website, and Title of the Result
On the Internet, titles of webpages generally come in the format "title of the article (separator) title of the website." The separator is generally a dash, a minus symbol (-), but some websites use a vertical pipe (|) instead. For example, the title of Wikipedia's article about turtles is "Turtle - Wikipedia." This means that if you access that Wikipedia's article, what will appear written in the tab in your browser is Turtle, dash, Wikipedia.
There is no rule that says titles of webpages must be like this, it's just a convention followed by webmasters (the administrators of the websites).
Google is capable of separating the title of the article from the title of the website. That's a neat trick to do, as often titles get so long that the name of the website doesn't fit the page.
Snippet and Bold Text
Under the title of the webpage, you'll find what's called the "snippet" of the result.
In the past, this area showed a description of the webpage written by the webmaster himself, but this description is rarely shown today. Instead, the snippet shows a part of the webpage that seems the most relevant to what you typed in the query.
Google will mark the words that match your query by making them bold in snippet. This gives us insight about why Google is showing us a result specifically. For example, in the screenshot above, the word "turtles" is marked in bold. The actual query I used to find that result was "turtle wikipedia." From this, we can tell that Google is able to match the plural word "turtles" in the result from the singular word "turtle" in the query.
In some cases, the words that Google marks in bold are completely different from the words we typed in the search box, because its algorithms have made several assumptions about what we want to find.
Icon and Image of the Result
Nowadays, results of many search engines also include a tiny icon image at the left side that's called a favicon. This is generally the same icon that shows in your web browser's tab when you open a webpage.
Google may also include a thumbnail of an image on the right side that it found in the webpage of the result. The icon is for the whole website, while this image is just for that result specifically.
In the example above, the icon is Wikipedia's logotype, a "W," while is a collage of photos of various turtles.
Path of the Result
The weirdest element of Google's results by far is the path of the webpage, which above starts with https then has a right arrow, or a greater than sign (>), separating words under the website's title. To understand this we need to understand a bit about how the web works.
Each webpage has its own URL. For our turtle article, it's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle. Here we have the protocol (https), the fully qualified domain name (en.wikipedia.org), and the path /wiki/Turtle. You may notice that the path uses forward slashes (/) as a separator, not greater signs (>), so why does Google do it differently?
What this path means exactly depends on the website. There are no rules about it whatsoever. In simpler web servers, the path is an actual path to a file, so anything that end in a slash (/) is an actual directory (a folder) in the web server's file system. In more complex web servers, this isn't true, but the idea that the slash separates directories or directory-like webpages remained.
For example, you could have a directory /movies/ that listed ALL movies of a website, /movies/comedy/ that listed comedy movies, and /movies/comedy/airplane that talked about Airplane!, which is a comedy movie.
However, you could also have /posts/12345/airplane, or /wiki/airplane, or even /posts?id=12345, so it depends on the website, and most of the time you won't be able to just erase part of the URL to go to a directory that includes that webpage.
And to be honest, making URLs that have categories is also incredibly difficult to manage from the programming side.
So webmasters came up with a different way to have "directories" in their webpages without having to change their URLs: breadcrumbs. Instead of relying on the URL structure, webpages began to include an actual "path" to that page as a link inside the webpage. These breadcrumbs are often separated by a symbol that looks like two arrows pointing to the right, e.g. Movies >> Comedy >> Airplane!. In a real website, each of these crumbs of bread would be a link to a "parent" webpage, and their URL wouldn't matter, e.g. "Comedy" could have a path such as /categories?id=42 that doesn't even include the word "comedy" in it.
Google can understand breadcrumbs on webpages, and if a webpage does have them, Google may show them in the search result. However, many websites, including Wikipedia, do not actually have any breadcrumbs on their webpages for Google to show, so Google just shows the URL path as if it were breadcrumbs in this case. And that's why the arrows around the wiki instead of slashes.
Information About The Result
You may notice that there are three vertical dots on the right side of the result path. That's a button, actually. If you click on it Google will show you more information about that result, specially information such as why Google is showing that result to you.
Links Related to a Result
Below the snippet, at the bottom of a single result, you can find links to webpages related to the result.
I'm not 100% sure, but I'm fairly certain Google only includes links to other webpages from the same website. You could say that they are even other results from the same website.
Google may also include a search box to search that website specifically in websites that support this feature.
Essentially anything that is in the area under the search result is related to the website of the result.
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