Back before the New Year Google announced a possible change in the way it 'may' display the URL snippet within each search results. Google has always advocated 'Accessibility' and 'Usability'. Breadcrumbs (a means to keep track of a user location and/or hierarchy within a website), promotes both of these philosophies. Google has been experimenting with an improvement that replaces the standard website URL's in 'some' search results with a hierarchy showing the precise location of the page on the website.

My guess is not only will this reward sites using best practices, but aids usability and gets rid of the long and often unreadable URL's found deep within a sites hierarchy.

There is no way to say for sure if Google will prefer sites with breadcrumbs or even decided to use the 'location breadcrumbs', but it's good news for advocators of web standards like myself. It shows Google is indeed looking at websites with properly built navigation.

All SEO aside, good navigation and the use of breadcrumbs is much better for the user/customer experience anyway and it's going to be interesting to see how much Google uses this improvement over the next few months and how sites perform.