Google Adds "Top Answers"

After panning Google earlier today for non-search changes like the addition of Play and disappearing search tools experiment, I should give them credit for a potentially useful search results change. Barry reported on SearchEngineLand that for some results from the Google Discussion database subset (web forums and Google Groups), that the results will include a new "Top Answer" tag line that highlights a potential answer to the search question. Searchers may not see this often. Clicking the Discussions database on the left will bring up more, but not all discussion records have it.

In addition to what Barry found, below is an example I was able to find when in "Everything." If you have not looked in the Discussions recently, also take a look at some of the other information that Google makes available on some Discussions results just under the URL like number of posts, number of authors, and date. While this information is not obvious on a quick look, I often find it very helpful in deciding which results to view.