Yesterday after reading a great interview with Eric Enge and Vanessa Fox on Stone Temple Consulting, I decided to do a little more research on Vanessa’s work experience. After typing in a branded query in my address bar in Chrome (her name), I was presented with a Knowledge Panel result in the right rail.
A knowledge Panel result typically will display for an informational search query for an entity that has verified data from either Wikipedia or Freebase (now defunct). In the above screenshot, we can see Vanessa has a Wikipedia page result that returned in position 2 two in my results.
New Knowledge Panel Feature Google is Testing
In the image on the right, I immediately noticed that I was able to select to get updates from Vanessa directly from the Knowledge Panel. After opting in for this feature I was displayed the image on the right of the above screenshot. I decided to share the new feature on Google+ to see if it was indeed a new feature or if it was just new to me. 🙂
Mark Traphagen tried to replicate the results with no success (see comment in Google+ post). I also tried a search today (5/18/2015) and noticed that the feature was no longer available in Vanessa’s Knowledge Panel confirming that this was indeed a Google test spotted “in the wild.”
If officially rolled out to users in the U.S. and beyond, the new feature would deepen personalized search by providing users with another new way to customize their search results.
Try a search for yourself and report back in the comments below if you’re seeing the new feature in a Knowledge Panel.
