Google’s latest feature: one-click concert tickets

By David Nield January 18, 2015

google now lets buy tickets well search gigs radiohead — Image used with permission by copyright holder

For some years now, Google has been improving its pages of search results so that clicking through to a website is no longer always necessary. Answers to questions, results of equations, info boxes on films and music, Wikipedia snippets and more have all been added, and there’s a new entry on the list — concert tickets.

If you’re a gigging band or musician, you can mark up particular content on your website to enable Google to find and recognize it. That information is then presented to users in their search results: Gig dates and locations can be displayed, together with a link to an authorized seller such as TicketMaster. If artists and their Web developers take the time to edit their site’s code accordingly, that’s a lot of saved clicks.

In the developer blog post announcing the new system, Google says there’s also scope for stand-up comics and the venues themselves to list upcoming shows, giving users an at-a-glance reference that makes the results page more useful than ever. The ability for musicians to add upcoming events was introduced last year, but the ticketing link is new, and it looks like the feature works across desktop and mobile.

Looking for musical artists on Google already brings up a ton of information right on the search page, including images, a discography and bio details, as well as links to various online profiles and digital music sites. The addition of a tickets link is just one more reason not to leave the Google ecosystem.

Google still enjoys a 75.2 percent share of the search market in the U.S. — while that’s a very dominant position, it has suffered its biggest drop since 2009, and if Apple continues to sideline Google search on iOS then the likes of Yahoo and Bing (actually powered by the same core technology) could make further inroads.

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Dave is a freelance journalist from Manchester in the north-west of England. He's been writing about technology since the…

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