Aaron Bradley spotted and posted on Google+ that Google has opened up a pilot for the search live coverage carousel. Google said this can be used to "surface content more quickly than is currently possible with a standard crawl on your website" and is designed to be in a carousel form to work show "live sports, elections, and breaking news."
I believe, but I can be wrong, this is related to the real time indexing API that Google announced at I/O. The same man at Google that is the man behind Google AMP, Richard Gingras, announced the real time indexing API.
This live coverage carousel requires AMP to work. Here are the core requirements:
- Content must be published using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP): By publishing your content with AMP, you’ll enable your pages to be loaded nearly instantly to users' devices. Read about how to Use AMP HTML in the AMP public developer docs.
- Your AMP pages must include structured data markup for the content itself: Structured data markup enables the preview for your live coverage article on the Search page and also helps Google better understand the context around a piece of content. Find out more in the Introduction to Structured Data.
- Content must be pushed to Google using an Atom XML feed: When you send your content to Google, you should use an an HTTP POST request in an Atom XML feed that contains your AMP page content as soon as it is published on the web. This allows Google to more quickly index your content.
Here is a screen shot of what this live coverage carousel may look like:
If you want to get your site to be included in this pilot, you can fill out this form.
This is interesting news and I assume that eventually anyone can add this markup to their site but Google will whitelist sites to be part of it. Otherwise, it can be a very dangerous spam situation. Or maybe they just use the same requirements they use for rich snippet inclusion?
Forum discussion at Google+.
Update: Google confirmed that the real time index mentioned here is the same thing as this live coverage carousel.
