Google appears to be ramping up their usage of comparison answer boxes in the last week or so, with more and more people reporting seeing them in action in the Google Search results.

They seem to only appear for non-commercial queries.  But more importantly, they don’t seem to have a source cited like many answer boxes do.  The data does not appear to be coming from Wikipedia, but the source is unknown.

Here is an example of the comparisons:

Many of them can be clicked on to show even more parameters for comparison.

They can be used to compare things like dog breeds, food and more.  Here is one comparing two food types, in this case honeydew and cantaloupe.

Here is one comparing pasta noodles to the popular spaghetti squash alternative.

And this one comparing dog breeds, which also works for breeds of other types of animals as well, including cats.This is a nice addition, especially for those who are watching calories or want to compare two things on the fly without having to visit two different webpages.

Google has also added other comparison answer boxes into the search results, although they are primarily within more commercial keyword areas, such as their mortgage comparisons and auto insurance comparisons.  However, these specific ones with the answer box styling as above seem to be limited to non competitive search queries, which is good for marketers since they don’t appear to have attribution on them.