Why use "SearchResultsPage"? Are there any rich snippets effect on SERPs?

Question

I am curious about why use SearchResultsPage? (See the definition SearchResultsPage - schema.org.)

In 2007, Matt Cuts said that Google Search does not like to index search results in websites (ref: Search results in search results). Many people also recommended to use <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />, and let the search engine not index the page, but follow the links on the page.

Since the Google search engine does not like to index search results in websites, why use SearchResultsPage? And, if using SearchResultsPage, are there any rich snippets effect on Google search result pages?

Answer 1

Schema.org is not only for search engines. There can be various consumers and tools making use of the data. For example, a browser add-on that allows users to download search results in a structured format.

Google is not the only search engine that consumes content marked up with Schema.org. Other search engines might have other guidelines about search result pages. And I think there can be good reasons for allowing bots to crawl and to index your search result pages, even for Google Search. As far as I know, Google does not provide a search result feature that makes use of SearchResultsPage.

Crawlers could use the SearchResultsPage type as signal that indexing these pages might not be worthwhile. If a service does not want to index search result pages, but the site doesn’t restrict the crawling (via robots.txt) or the indexing (via meta-robots) of these pages, this service can learn about the nature of the page by checking the structured data and finding the SearchResultsPage type (ah, it’s most likely a page containing search results, let’s ignore it).