I reported at Search Engine Roundtable that Google is now showing related searches at the bottom of the search results page. An example query working now is for michael jordan, scroll down to the bottom of the page and you might see the “Searches related to: michael jordan” area. If not, I have a screen shot in the link above. I believe this is new. If it is not, then Google may be showing them more often since yesterday.
Related Topics: Google: User Interface | Search Features: Query Refinement
I commented over on your post, Barry, but yup: this is new. As always, we experiment with ways to help users, including query refinement. Any new feature has a high bar to meet before we turn it on 100%; we don’t want features that crowd the page but don’t really help users.
Related Search is a great feature – the users love it. We find on the site search that we run that about 25% of people use it. We typically show related searches at the top and the bottom.
The other benefit Google will see is that it will increase their revenue from the paid search results.