Your search results page is packed with information. Here's a quick guide to decoding it.
Each underlined item is a search result that the Google search engine found for your search terms. The first item is the most relevant match we found, the second is the next-most relevant, and so on down the list. Clicking any underlined item will take you to the related web page.
Here's a sample search results page, along with brief explanations of the various types of information about your results that you can find there. Click each letter to jump to a description of that feature.
Google navigation bar
Click the link for the Google service you want to use. You can search the web, browse for images, news, maps and videos, and navigate to Gmail and other Google products.
This links to a page that lets you set your personal search preferences, including your language, the number of results you'd like to see per page, and whether you want your search results screened by our SafeSearch filter to avoid seeing adult material.
These dynamic links suggest content types that are most relevant to your search term. You can click any of these links in order to see more results of a particular content type.
Google's search technology looks across all types of content and ranks the results that are most relevant to your search. Your results may be from multiple content types, including images, news, books, maps and videos.
The first line of any search result item is the title of the webpage that we found. If you see a URL instead of a title, then either the page has no title or we haven't yet indexed that page's full content, but its place in our index still tells us that it's a good match for your query.
This is an excerpt from the results page with your query terms bolded. If we expanded the range of your search using stemming technology, the variations of your search terms that we searched for will also be bolded.
This number is the size of the text portion of the web page, and gives you some idea of how quickly it might display. Size figure don't appear for sites that are not yet indexed.
Clicking this link will show you the contents of the web page when we last indexed it. If for some reason the site link doesn't connect you to the current page, you might still find the information you need in the cached version.
When Google finds multiple results from the same website, the most relevant result is listed first, with other relevant pages from that site indented below it.
Clicking the "plus box" icon reveals additional info about your search result. You'll see this feature for pages related to publicly traded U.S. stocks, local businesses, and Google and YouTube videos.
Sometimes the best search terms for what you're looking for are related to the ones you actually entered. Click these related search terms to see alternate search results.
