Google's New View

Is it me, or did Google recently add an additional navigation bar?
This one reveals itself ONLY if the search results show the respective content?

Here's an example using today's Dalai Lama story:

From what I can tell, the lower navigation bar (upper left, below the Google logo) only shows navigable content within the search results. I tried a different search that showed videos further down the results, and the navigation failed to show-up until I set the Preferences to "Show 100 results". Then the nav returned.

OK, so here's what yo get when you click each respective nav link:
 
Google Blog search results. (Notice that Video, News and Web are eliminated when each of other nav links are selected).

Google News search results.

Google Video search results.

Now, I wonder if those nav links reorder themselves based on the density or the order of media in the primary Web search? Something we'll experiment with.

Any thoughts? Is this Google's way of keeping a simple orderly search results page while still providing ALL of the media some exposure on the home page?

Is it a way to generate more AdWords showings, quadrupling potential ad exposures... and valuable clicks?

More on this as we investigate.

Mark Alan Effinger

Comments

[Matt Kluemper]

Hey Mark - Google's Universal Search sure is interesting! The new navigational search actually came out in May (search 'universal search' in Google, and click on Danny Sullivan's post from Search Engine Land), and with the continued purchases of social media sites (YouTube, Feedburner, etc.), Universal Search is definitely on Google's priority list. Even though they have been doing this for the past 6 or so months, it will be interesting to see how it fully rolls out in the next two months.

[eAgent]

Hi Matt - Yes, we have been watching the rollout as it's happened. We started developing the RichContent platform in March 2006, just taking advantage of what we were seeing in online press releases, blogs, images and video showing on the additional tabs on Google. But Katie Bar the Door! Now that they make front page on ALL the key searches, it's a whole new game.

We're hoping to see more elegant use of front-page real estate on Google (ala Ask.com) and some additional controls to help searchers know WHY that particular media is associated with a search.

BTW, you folks do a great job of sharing your vision and providing valuable insights into good SEO-SEM. Nice work. Let's connect sometime soon.