That once-familiar sea of plain text with blue underlined links has long been history as Google have shovelled ever more things into their SERPs. It’s not uncommon now to find a page where normal organic results are outnumbered 3 to 1 (something that I first noticed waaaay back when). The results currently are, I think we would mostly agree, messy. All the inline results serve to create clutter and confusion and it’s something that Google has clearly been aware of for a while.
Rumour has it that Matt Cutt’s spam team have been put slightly on the back burner as Google focuses attention for a while on the GUI side of things (which might account for some of the randomness of recent updates). Their efforts have been getting trialled out in the wild on a random, per-user basis since the end of 2009 and today I got my own personal first-hand taste of the interface for the first time.
Here’s my thoughts
Shopping Results
Google Updates (nee ‘realtime)
I’m no fan of Twitter or Google realtime results, but at least this is a nicer interface and the features are pretty cool. It’s certainly a better way of searching Twitter than anything Twitter themselves have managed. You can also see how trends develop over time and get micro-snapshots of the kind of things people have been saying. If you’re interested in brand engagement through Twitter then this is pretty obviously gold dust, and presumably Google see an opportunity for them to cannibalise Twitter’s mismatch between massive popularity and shit functionality.
Google News
News hasn’t changed much, but the layout is much clearer. You can also (in a recurring theme of this news update) restrict your news search to all news, images and blogs. Interestingly there’s no option in there for ‘just newspapers’ – which you would have thought would be more critical if you don’t want results full of blog crap. I also noticed that the ‘safesearch’ options are more visible throughout all sections of the new Google.
Google Discussion Results
Pretty cool thing, discussion results. I don’t how many times I’ve tacked the word ‘forum’ onto the end of a search query to try and find a decent discussion group. Google now categorises that for me with options to see long discussions, short discussions… discussions from a particular timeframe… etc
Conclusions
Most of this stuff is already in the interface, but hidden away under the ‘show options’ link, which I suspect not many people even notice – much less use. Google seem to be bringing these natty little customisations more into people’s view – presumably as a preface to greater personalisation and stuff that I can’t be bothered typing out because you’re not really interested in reading it and the snooker’s on anyway.