I think I've seen this before quite a while back and then never again. Basically, there is a navigation breadcrumb in the Google SERP that mirrors the search refinement.

Never seen that, looks like a knowledge graph response

Yeah, exactly. Google understands that there is a hierarchy of information
- All info about Rathbun Lake
--- info about fish in Rathbun Lake

The breadcrumb is clickable, so you can back up in the hierarchy. So it is an actually effort to *organize* knowledge.

Was hoping it'd give an answer for the reverse but unfortunately not

"which lakes can you find largemouth bass"

I wouldn't expect that to work since that would number in the thousands and there probably isn't any list. So that's a big step up in using natural language processing to build a knowledge graph and then be able to query it.

In other words, your system has to get smart enough to know that a lake is a lake (because I don't want to know fish species from restaurants, for example), extract from articles about each lake what species of fish live there, put that in a DB that can be queried, and then pull that data in roughly real time in response to a query. That is full-on Star Trek computer and I think we're still many years away from that.

My question just requires that you understand that "what kind of fish are in Rathbun Lake" is a specific topic in the general Rathbun Lake topic and you probably know that because it's a specific topic on general Rathbun Lake sites/pages.

So compared to where search was 10 years ago, I'm still impressed. But I think you need to come back 10 years from now to see if a search engine understands your question in the same way.

Yes I agree it's very impressive organisation

And indeed, my example would have 1000's of results, probably not something they'd have available in real time, but perhaps they have the data relationships for it.

"lakes in the united states" also returns the breadcrumb and using your example on other lakes seems to return results too.

Interesting and impressive, especially if I compare that to the spam-infested SERPs of ten years ago. It was great to be able to rank easily for things, but in my academic research, it was so awful.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/breadcrumb-serps/239637/ (note the citation for where the breadcrumbs were first noted)

haha, that's cool :-)

Roger found some really interesting examples and has some good insights. I hadn't thought that on mobile, the breadcrumbs have much more utility.