Mashable had an interesting article on some experimentation that Google was performing on how they were going to display the results of their search results. Oddly this looked very familiar. This segmentation of the search results has somewhat been a part of the Google results UI for a few years and has been slowly evolving. Today was the first time that I have seen results that look nearly identical to the needs of some of the enterprises for search appliances.
Contextual results are nothing new within the enterprise. But results displayed by content type is something newer for the general Google public. It makes me think that there is more to what Google is now offering – especially since they are taking over so much more of the ES market than in the past. It used to be a very common statement to choosing Google Search Appliance to be, “Everyone is used to how Google works” so they took the common UI of Google and found power behind the GSA appliance. The pendulum seems to be swinging to the other side where the needs and requests of the enterprise are sneaking to the public side. That said, there are a number of core Google (public) search features that the enterprise is clamoring for notably website preview, video and audio search to name a few.
I like the direction, should they decide to go the currently explored route, Google is going. Contextual search is very powerful – SEO gurus take note because this changes that game in a big way!
Great post, Jonathan. Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land also has some thoughts: http://searchengineland.com/google-testing-new-search-results-page-look-does-anyone-actually-like-it-76116?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed-main