Google made some changes to knowledge graphs for book titles in January that when you clicked on the “people also searched for” within the knowledge graph, it would show a book carousel. Google is now expanding on that and is now showing the carousel directly in the search results for book related searches.
I was doing a book search as I was traveling and couldn’t remember the title of a book I read, where the premise was a hacker was able to remotely control a passenger jet by hacking into the computer system, which is rather timely with recent current events prompting discussion about whether air-traffic controllers should have the ability to remotely control the plane from the ground.
When doing the search, it spawned the carousel of many different blogs that Google thought it could possibly be.
You can see for this particular search query, they also include a block of Google Shopping product results.
Searchers can then click through to any of the titles for more information, which keeps the carousel on top, adds a knowledge graph for the specific book, and then provides organic search results for the book titles.
While I couldn’t find any books with paid search results when I clicked through, it is likely that there are ads running for some of the titles when they are clicked on.
Search queries such as “Books by Stephen King” and “dystopian novels” also brings up the new carousel.
Google has been long known as being pretty amazing when it comes to providing search results for some pretty obscure search phrases when people are trying to find a movie or television show. So it is not surprising that they are applying the same treatment to book searches.
What is also rather interesting about this test is that Google recently removed many similar styled carousels from the search results.
Being also recently added book carousel to their search results, but those carousels are restricted to a select few search queries related to best-selling books in a few different category areas.
This is a great addition to book related searches, especially for avid readers who might be looking for books dealing with specific topics, like the plane crash and dystopian examples.
I questioned in January why Google didn’t expand their book knowledge graphs further, especially since Bing introduced their own carousels, and the answer now appears to be that they were working on it. And the carousels are a great visual for those who are trying to remember a book title.
Jennifer Slegg
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