Getting ready for tonights Champions League games? If you are a soccer fan then the newest addition to Google might be something for you. Google announced that from now on, when searching for “UEFA Champions League” or simply “Champions League” you will get match scores and schedules in your search result. At the top under the website from the UEFA Google will place a OneBox. Behind each match there is al link to the specific match on UEFA.com. Above the OneBox there are links to Standings, Matches, Clubs and Statistics.
By clicking the link ‘Show more games’ you will see more matches that already have taken place and more upcoming matches. A very nice feature for if you want to search which teams are playing on what dates. At this moment this only works on Google.com and Google.co.uk. I´m not seeing it yet on local versions.
It was already possible to find information with Google about previous and next matches in local competitions for clubs also delivered by UEFA.com. For example if you search for FC Barcelona or AC Milan you will see the result from the last competition match and you will see when the next match will be including date and time.
Have fun if your are watching one of the games tonight!
Update
Now that the matches started it turns out that Google is showing the scores almost realtime.
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This actually is a pretty neat feature. I’ve searched many times for the right site to quickly get the scores and I always struggle. Google is probably the most easy way
[...] State of Search [...]
It may be easier but it’s yet another case of Google stealing traffic from established websites. This time sports & news websites are the victims. One day soon we’ll never need to leave Google’s SERPs ever again – except when we click on ads. And they’ll probably open up in new tabs soon enough…
Completely agree with you Barry, my colleague Tara wrote about how Google’s taking traffic away from sites in a number of ways here -
http://www.koozai.com/blog/search-marketing/google-the-big-hungry-monster/
Completely agree with you Barry, my colleague Tara wrote about how Google’s taking traffic away from sites in a number of ways here -
http://www.koozai.com/blog/search-marketing/google-the-big-hungry-monster/
Ok, (I kind of agree, but for the sake of the discussion): yes, Google ‘might’ be taking away ‘some’ traffic from these sites. But is that really what we want to have these sites for?
Take a football site: we should go there for news, for background information etcetera, but live scores? Is that really high quality content?
Maybe websites like this are going to run into the same issues which newspapers are running into: what is their purpose, what are they here for?
[/ discussion mode off]
& takes traffic away from sports sites
good move…
Yup – it is quite neat – but I agree that Google are going too far now.
[...] look at the Champions League results as an example. It won’t stop [...]
[...] look at the Champions League results as an example. It won’t stop [...]
Google keep messing with things. Maybe it’s time to find other ways.