Are Google going all Bing?

Don’t ask the reasons why I performed the following search – however I was surprised to see Google playing round with yet more layout tweaks during a recent search for fellow UK Search Marketeer, Andrew Girdwood from Bigmouthmedia.

My first thought was that this may be down to some configurations on my browser – however this does appear to be quite a distinctive tweak to the search page particularly if you compare this with my Mediavest colleague Jon Myers

You will notice the following characteristics

• Integration of side navigation
• Results font smaller and bolder
• Show more results not underlined
• Blue bar removed between search box and results

Anyone else seen this in the wild  or is this yet more fun and games from the mighty Google

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Comments

Had this comment sent to us by a reader of James Allen on F1 (Desinole) which shows searches for ‘James Allen on F1′ seeing a similar pages – so it would appear this may be a bigger test

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Comment by Peter Young on February 23, 2010 @ 11:21 pm

yes, i just noticed it. not liking it at all either.

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Comment by dcolon13 on February 23, 2010 @ 11:32 pm

… it’s enough to make me wonder! :p

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Comment by Andrew Girdwood on February 24, 2010 @ 8:18 am

This could be the layout change we were able to test out towards the end of last year with the permanent sidebar (Bing style) they are slowly rolling out

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Comment by Brett Pringle on February 24, 2010 @ 8:41 am

I believe this happened to me but I assumed, as you did, it was merely the browser (or the beer).

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Peter Young Reply:
February 24th, 2010 at 8:55 am

I can categorically rule out the beer – as I was (unfortunately) t-total last night

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Comment by SEOWebHelp on February 24, 2010 @ 8:46 am

It’s just google.com. it’s been like this for months. not seen it in google.co.uk, was your search in Google.co.uk or .com?

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Peter Young Reply:
February 24th, 2010 at 2:03 pm

It was .co.uk

As regards the .com SERPs I have seen the following pages before

http://searchengineland.com/google-streamlines-search-options-30143

however this appears to be a variation of those earlier tests

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Comment by aukseo on February 24, 2010 @ 9:08 am

I hate the new google social contacts they recently been testing also.

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Comment by G13 Media on February 25, 2010 @ 12:37 pm

[...] you noticed any changes to the Google search results pages recently? Maybe it isn’t very significant but it might be worth taking a look.  For [...]

Pingback by Is Google Playing Around…Again? – SEO Central on March 10, 2010 @ 10:18 pm

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