When you are building a site which has a search result page, (similar to https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/unanswered for example) which has excerpts from each article and a link to the article, how do you instruct the search engine to direct users to the actual article not the results page?
If we had the content replicated on another page we could use rel='canonical'
which would essentially do this at a page level, but what happens when you have excerpts from multiple pages in the same physical page?
Does this even matter at all? SE doesn't seem to do anything special here (that I could see). I just really don't want users to ever be directed to a results page when they could get the article content instead.