Google Introduces Candidate Cards For Presidential Election Season

Google is giving Republican and Democratic candidates a privileged place in search in 2016. The company has launched what it says is an experimental feature that will create a prominent placement for the candidates’ own messages and content in a horizontal carousel in search results.

These structured results will appear basically in the way that Twitter posts currently appear for candidate-related queries. However the module can accommodate a much broader array of content forms:

• Candidates will be able to publish text with lengths up to 14,400 characters
• Candidates will be able to add up to 10 images or videos per post

Google said in a blog post about the upcoming Republican debate that “political search interest spikes 440 percent on average during live televised debates as people turn to the web to learn more about the candidates and their platforms.” The new candidate cards will allow candidates to speak directly to voters and control some of the content in search about them.

As indicated, candidates will be able to incorporate text, images and video to communicate their positions directly to voters. This is not an ad unit. The feature will first be available for the forthcoming televised Republican debate on January 28 and thereafter through the election in November.

The image above (used in USAToday but also provided directly to us) is a Google mock-up of how these candidate cards will look on mobile. There’s no corresponding desktop image but these cards will also appear in PC search results.

Google indicated it will show the new cards when its ranking algorithms figure out whether a searcher wants to hear directly from or about a candidate. The methodology is similar to how and when Google determines whether to show Knowledge Graph results.

Google will allow current Democratic and Republican presidential candidates (not third party candidates or those who’ve dropped out) to supply content and use the module. Google also indicated that these cards will not displace Twitter in search results.

Currently there appears to be no plan to expand this feature beyond politics to commerce or other content areas.

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