Google today has confirmed their rollout of a new user interface for desktop search. Barry Schwartz had reported on seeing what we now know are early stages of this over on Search Engine Roundtable on November 14th. As one could easily expect with the current goings-on at Google the move pushes the interface closer to the mobile experience which doesn’t just include the listings themselves but data drawn right from the site. For example, in a search for “google” I saw the following:
You can easily notice that the Tweets drawn from Google’s twitter page are displayed in small boxes as are the news stories.
Whether this is to ease development on their end, a test of preferences or simply a reaction to users perhaps adjusting the way they want things displayed on desktop due to the time spent on mobile I’m not sure but it will be interesting to watch as this move continues. One interesting by-product I immediately notice is that a lot of queries once more show less pure organic search results due to the increased room take up by the boxes and with the arrows on things like Twitter feeds users are encourages to remain on Google rather than clicking through to other sites.