Last Wednesday saw the official worldwide roll out of the new Google sidebar – you may have already experienced the sidebar long before the roll out; mainly it was in the form of a ‘Show options’ link which would open up the sidebar. It seems that it will now be a permanent fixture on Google’s search results pages and no longer optional.*
The screenshot below shows the results of ‘ramen noodles’; with the sidebar on the left, main search results in the centre and the sponsored results to the right. If you’ve ever used Yahoo! and Bing search, you will notice that the new Google user interface is not exactly a ‘new look’. In fact, Ask.com had displayed the three column layout in 2007.
This new shake-up of the SERPs will have an interesting effect on current SEO efforts as the user now has more search options at their fingertips to filter out, refine and find exactly what they are looking for. Searching habits will change as users realise they have more control over the results and learn to interact more with the sidebar.
I think the sidebar coincides with the Google Caffeine roll out that calls for more accuracy and relevancy in the search results, and with which the sidebar has been provided to help aid the user towards.
Google have gone all out with the blended results, displaying ‘everything’ as default, as shown in bold in the sidebar. This means a mixture of organic results, videos, images, news, etc, depending on what you search for. For my post, I searched for ‘ramen noodles’. This brought up sponsored results, normal organic results (including the ubiquitous Wikipedia), shopping results,
image results,
video results,
and related searches, formerly known as ‘pages similar to’,
If I click the ‘more’ tab in the sidebar, I get more search results options, which each have their own filtering that can be further applied. Rather than listing them all, I’ve made a screenshot of the the expanded list below.
So clicking on Images will refine my search term and display only image results. Further filters include by size, colour and type.
Videos will display an array of clips from various sources including, but not limited to Google Video and YouTube (also owned by Google). These videos can be filtered by the duration of the clip, the date of the clip and the source, to name a few.
Maps brings up ramen noodle related places in America, which is pretty useless to me if I wanted somewhere closer to home. Google’s not so helpful suggestion of ‘ramen noodles near Leeds, United Kingdom’ is no good either considering I live in Manchester, UK.
News brings up the latest topics on ‘ramen noodles’ from news providers and respected blogs from around the world. Notice that the results are not in chronological date order, but in the order of what Google thinks is most relevant. This can be changed by choosing sort by date, located at the bottom of the sidebar.
Books will list related books and magazines by order of relevance, which can filtered to display only full view (the complete book) or including just the preview, or just show the results from magazines. I like the grid layout feature; it provides a more visual feel than the standard list view, which I think is more apt for browsing books.
Blogs will display results of blogs and blogposts, which I find can be rather random at times depending on what you are searching for, but nonetheless a very useful source for information and ideas.
Updates shows a timeline of the last 24 hours with the blue bars representing tweets, and the latest tweets displayed below. I can see from this that ramen noodles is mentioned more during the evening. The timeline can be toggled to as far back as 9 February 2010 and could server as an interesting tool for keyword research and user statistics.
Discussions brings up results from forums and ‘question and answer’ sites, which can be further filtered by length.
*Optional isn’t entirely correct. If the sidebar really bugs you, there are several ways you can remove it.
The twitter updates option is really interesting, I never thought that Google would go as far a implementing a tab only for these. On the overall side of it I think that the “sponsored links” are set even more to the right and the column separation is more important. This makes the organic results jump out and gives less importance to the paid links as was the case with the older version with the header covering the whole of the results pages. Will this bring a change in the way people use the search results?
Posted by Sachin @ Web Design Mauritius | 10. May, 2010, 8:58 amIt’s very simple to remove it!
http://www.seotools.com/hide-google-options/#
Posted by Zvi | 10. May, 2010, 11:26 am