Hi all and welcome to another SEO Roundup.  This week we saw a, somewhat major, redesign of the Google search results page.  We'll take a closer look at what that change was and how it could affect Google's users. 

If you use Google to search the Internet, you’ve probably seen the newly updated Google search results with the more colorful (and eye catching) options on the left. Google just made the change this week, although they’ve been testing this for long time. It’s one of the more radical changes to “vanilla” or plain search results that we’ve seen in a long time. The options that appear on the left will change depending on the type of query.

As an example, here is a search for toy car 

As you can see, this search returns “images” and “shopping” as two of the top options. Other options like blogs, books, and discussions are not included in the top options.

Another example search: time square bomb 

This search has a much more significant real time / news component. The top options are news, updates, and videos.

Why does this matter? I would guess that up until now there has been a significant portion of Google users who don’t regularly use Google’s other search products. Google Shopping, Google News, Google Blog Search, Google Video; all of these features are great search engines in their own right. By adding color and more prominently featuring these products (they used to only be available the top of a Google page) more users will filter their results depending on their intent.