Looking to quickly find the latest baseball score or follow a football game in real time? Google and ESPN have brought the scoreboard straight to the search results to provide live MLB and NFL scores, or send you to game recaps, box scores, schedules, and more.
The new microdata allows users to get results for searches that include teams, players, scores, and other queries specific to professional baseball and football in the U.S. The rich results will provide the record of recently concluded games, details of upcoming games, and quick links to summary pages for greater detail on all of the above. The most notable feature is that a search for an in-progress game will give you a link to a live stream from ESPN.
This month, Google added both NFL and MLB results, but stated that they hope to add rich results for other sports in the near future. Google specifically mentioned basketball, hockey, and soccer.
Right now, this data markup is exclusive to ESPN. It’s not the first time Google has partnered with the sports world either, having previously shown real-time data for the NBA and NHL.
This time around, however, Google is both expanding to new sports and introducing a data markup that is likely to become public in the near future. According to ESPN’s Chris Jason, “We’re working with Google to standardize the format so that others can make use of this technology going forward.” The standardized markup is likely to be announced on schema.org when it’s ready.