Friday, March 4, 2016

Google’s Candidate Cards Being Tested For Businesses?

Move over Trump, Clinton and the rest of you hopeful presidential candidates. A jeweler in Buffalo, NY, is using what looks like a version of Candidate Cards to show a handful of posts inside a carousel on the first page of Google’s search results.

Mike Blumenthal spotted the Candidate Cards carousel appearing today on a search for “engagement rings buffalo.” In my testing, that query shows a carousel of posts from Andrews Jewelers on both desktop and mobile. Here’s how it looks on the desktop:

andrews-jeweler-cards-google

Google announced a product called Candidate Cards in late January to give presidential candidates a chance to add their own content and messages directly on the search results page. The cards are not a paid unit, and candidates can post up to 14,400 characters of text and 10 images/videos per post.

Google’s blog post from January only refers to the feature being available to political candidates and its initial partner, Fox News Channel. Today, Google’s landing page for this “experimental new podium” says that’s still the case, but says that it will expand:

Currently, this feature is an experiment that is only available to the 2016 US presidential candidates. In the future, we plan to make it available to other prominent figures and organizations.

The landing page also shows a logo of a person standing behind a podium with Google’s capital G logo, and in the lower right of the page, that logo is accompanied by the phrase, “Your podium on Google.”

We’ve reached out to Google today to get more information on this, but the company has yet to reply. We’ll update this post if and when that happens. Early last week, when we noticed that the cards were still showing for Fox News, a Google spokesperson told us, “We’re always experimenting with the look and feel of our products but have nothing new to announce.”

The post Google’s Candidate Cards Being Tested For Businesses? appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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