Google Testing A Much Cleaner Looking SERP

UPDATE: I thought I remembered seeing this somewhere before last night – and in fact Barry from Search Engine Land had talked about the lack-of-left-sidebar briefly back in June. Although there a some differences between the June design and the one I see now (it’s still showing up).

Just wanted to share a few quick screencaps of a new layout Google is testing. The left sidebar is missing, and all of its options are now horizontally just above the results and just below the search box.

My first impression? I like it. I tried running a number of different types of queries – informational, ecommerce, local etc. To me, I feel an improvement across the board towards some needed de-cluttering.

Well – have a quick look at the screencaps! Not sure if they’re just doing some testing, or planning on rolling this out to everyone soon.

Make sure you get to the bottom, for one that is pretty different than anything I’ve seen in the SERPs so far…

 

Closer look at the new horizontal menu – the red line underneath shows which section you’re in;

 

Here’s a news view;

 

An image view;

 

A closer look at when you click “search tools” option;

 

Didn’t seem to work for shopping;

 

One thing I found really interesting was the absence of ads on highly local searches, like this;

 

Let’s have a look at a few knowledge graph results – note that the box its self resizes with the browser window;

 

And one other – note that what (as I recall anyway) used to be a broken display, which was all song names in band results, has been fixed. It sits inside a table with scroll bars;

 

Here’s what you see by clicking the “more” button;

 

One of the most interesting changes – a popup to select date ranges;

 

That’s all I got! Anyone else seen / seeing this? Do you like the layout?