What is SERP

The results page of a search engine (also known by the acronym SERP “search engine results page), is a web page that a search engine generates automatically based on keywords entered by a user, and consists of a set of links to resources that it considers, among those that index, as relevant to this complaint under its intrinsic classification system.

The results are generally presented as a list, ordered by decreasing relevance.
There are however, exotic presentations, like that proposed by the metasearch engine Kartoo, conjoining the results as graphs representing the relationships between them.

For each outcome
Each outcome can have elements such as:
title and/or URL of the resource;
rank and/or percentage of relevance of the resource, according to the classification established by the search engine;
a summary or brief description of the resource;
favicon of the website
a preview image (screenshot) of the resource;
extract the resource containing the keywords by highlighting (e.g. in bold);
the size of the resource in bytes;
the type of resource, in the case of documents that are not web pages (PDF, RTF, DOC, TXT, etc.) these formats require external software to the browser for viewing, a link to a web page conversion can be proposed;

links:
automatic translation of the resource;
a cached version of the resource (if it is inaccessible), possibly with the keywords of the query highlighted for example;
the date on which the document has been indexed and cached.

Google Labs is trying other types of presentations such as:
A timeline (Example Research Beatles);
A link to Google Maps

Other information contained in a results page. The page can also contain:
an input field to submit a new request;
ad links in areas in principle clearly identified: the search engines are generally free, these ads allow companies that publish to make profits (eg Google AdWords);
suggestions of different queries:
with a combination of keywords that might be more effective;
with the correct spelling, if a fault has been detected in the initial request;
a smaller corpus (e.g. limited to one language, a particular type of resource), or if the request was initially limited to a corpus different or more generally.
sending a link to the results page to a friend by email (eg Mozbot).

The results are generally too numerous to be displayed on one page, so they are spread over a number of successive pages. The total number of pages and/or results is usually displayed with links to navigate between different pages. There are search engines that can recognize certain types of queries, and display results accordingly.

For example:

A map of the location corresponding to a name, or on behalf of an institution;
the result of a mathematical calculation;
conversion units;

definition, a link or summary of an article encyclopedic (usually Wikipedia);
comparisons of prices for a product etc..

Caching

In order to improve their response time, some search engines cache the pages of matches to search queries, and display these versions cached rather than processed online. These results pages are regularly updated to take account of new resources, and possibly adjust the ranking of different resources. The updating of cached page’s results may however take several days or weeks, which may lead to inappropriate results becoming obsolete.

Related Articles

Optimization for search engines • Google Bombing • Spamdexing: techniques to improve, sometimes abusive, the visibility of a resource in the results pages of search engines. “I’m Feeling Lucky”, a feature of Google that automatically forwards to the highest ranked result, bypassing the results page.