Today, I noticed while I was using Google today (which is a website some of you may of heard of), and I noticed they jazzed up where the URL is normally listed:
I don’t know whether to puke or have a seizure. I liked having the URL there. But then again, the URL is meaningless to 99% of users, because people like to put their head in the sand and create absolutely useless URLs. I’m looking at you, Dell and HP. And a whole lot more.
So yeah, probably a usability improvement. And you can click on the little segments. Personally I don’t like it, but that’s ’cause I’m a power user that looks at URLs. And if I really want to, I can always just hover over the link to get the URL anyway.
I wonder how it works. XML Sitemaps, maybe?
Update: Google has written about it. Looks like they analyse anything that looks like breadcrumbs. Too bad it’s not standardised, and they don’t actually tell you how to do it.
Yeah I noticed that as well. I thought it might have been based around link structure/hierarchy, but breadcrumbs makes more sense (I tend to use those).
Personally I don’t mind it. It’s kinda nice, and potentially good for SEO reasons (people may choose to visit a parent URL to find something more relevant or broad). Looks like it won’t be long until every word in the meta description becomes linkable. Ahh semantic web here we come!