Testing, Testing, Testing: A Recap Of Google’s Latest Search Tests

Google is known to run hundreds of experiments a year and often we pick up on some of those experiments and report back on them over here. Many of those experiments have to do with the user interface and how Google makes small tweaks to the layout, design, fonts and colors to see what type of impact it has on the searcher.

Many of these tests we capture and categorize in the Google user interface section. There is also an excellent new resource for tracking every minor change Google tests, it is at allgoogletesting.blogspot.com.

That being said, I wanted to share a screen shot Dr. Peter J. Meyers from Moz sent me of many new changes we’ve been seeing but all on one page. You’ll see a new card like layout, new dividers, new fonts, no underlines on hyperlinks, how they separate news results from images from web and so on. This is the new unified design Google has been rolling out on mobile and expected to roll out on desktop slowly.

You can click on the image to enlarge but you’ll see the yellow ad label, the desktop unified design, and much more.

Here are some of the tests we noticed recently:

• Google’s Yellow “Ad” Icons Test Appears To Be Expanding
• Google Tests Search Results Overview Snippets Overlay
• Bing Updates Deep Links Management While Google Displays Up To Ten Sitelinks
• Google Testing Site Name & URL In Search Result Snippets
• Google Testing Larger News Photos In Search Results
• Google Tests Replacing URL With Site Name In Search Results; Again

Dr. Pete also has a post at Moz named Future SERP: A Glimpse at Google 2014 which looks at many of these design experiments and predicts what will stick and what will not.

Many of Google’s experiments do make it to the search results for many but Google is constantly tweaking and changing their user interfaces, which may have an impact on your search referral traffic.