While searching for something on Google, I found a result from Stack Overflow. Answers from Trilogy sites seem to only contain snippets of text from the question and maybe from one of the answers. Would it add any value to have additional metadata on that search result (last modified date, last user to make a change in the post)? I've noticed that, when searching, I tend to look for more recent stuff; quite a few blogs, when searched, offer date of publishing as a search result:

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For other sites, there's even more information available, offering even related search results from the same site:

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Since Google is probably the biggest traffic provider for most Trilogy sites, playing nice and offering more information to users might be a way to differentiate such results and draw more people in. Is such a thing even possible or does Google ultimately decide what gets shown for each result?

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You'll have to contact Google about that; we don't control what they display.

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Thanks for the information. I was hoping that maybe there was a way to make the metadata available for Google to index and display. –  alex Jun 2 '10 at 20:31
@alex there is microformats but I don't think there's a public one we can use searchengineland.com/… per the article "This initial launch supports reviews (with sites such as Yelp) and people (with sites such as LinkedIn)" –  Jeff Atwood Jun 2 '10 at 21:56
@JeffAtwood But what about the custom search thing Google has? I don't know if it's related to OpenSearch, but I think check for a <rel> tag or something to format the results like for this search –  YatharthROCK Sep 11 '12 at 15:31
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