Update:

Barry Schwartz let me know that is feature has been around for awhile “October of 2008. Surprised I missed this one.

Last week I noticed a change on how Google is displaying results for website forums. They are now showing, or a least I am seeing, additional information like: How Many Posts, How Many Authors, and Last Post Date. I have not seen any websites talking about this so, if this is an old feature let me know.

Check it out yourself “.htaccess 301 redirect forum”

Screenshot below:

I am impressed that Google has the ability to crawl forums and pull this data out. Reminds me of how big brother is always watching over us.

It is good to see that Google is always trying to test and update the way they display search results to their users. It makes for a better user experience. Even today they announced Two new improvements to Google results pages.

Google will be better refinement for their related searches and will be giving it more prominent placements in the SERPS. This means that keyword research just got a whole lot more interesting. For instance, a search for “principles of physics” provides suggestions for some of the more popular principles like “big bang” and “special relativity.” This will enhance user experience greatly but it also means that you need to be weary of related topics that you have not yet optimized for!

They are also increasing the amount of content that will be displayed on longer tail searches. So a search for something like “earth’s rotation axis tilt and distance from sun” will pull SERPS with expanded content snippets. Makes sense since that is a lot of words to find on a given page. This also means that having better, and more, on page content will benefit you. If you do not have enough content you will be missing out on a lot of long tail traffic, which is valuable.

So Google is enhancing the user experience, good. But they are also telling Web site owners that they need better content and more of it, good.

Comment below if you have any thing to add.