I saw a result in which the navigation to various other searches was listed in a drop down immediately to the right of the search box; I didn't think to take a screen shot. Personally I didn't think it was a good idea; it looked bad and it required three clicks to go from a web search to image, rather than the one click you have at present.

i don't like the look of the new one. they should stick with how it is at the moment

I haven't seen the results first hand.

But, I don't have any issue with the screen shot.

It would seem that this new set up would allow for the sponsored results as well as the organic results to be pushed closer to the top of the page.

That would have obvious implications.

First and foremost it would help to "retrain" the searcher who has become "banner blind" to the top of web pages.

This would increase the value of Gs ad space.

Another aspect would be that now, G would have a left column to further exploit. Maybe we will see additional related links to the original search show up there. Maybe Google Base.

Perhaps the red text was a test to see how well it draws new attention to that link.

It might also be a minor test to see how well its customers (us) receive a Google SERP with more color. A forebearer of the new more graphic ad spots that AOL is in the process of developing.

Not good

Experimenting with suggestions from eye-tracking studies, perhaps? Maybe if the basic tools in this configuration can attract more clicks than the standard positions, all things being equal, they might conclude that ads would perform better there as well. But why not just jump ahead and test the ads in new positions for a random subset of searchers?
Eh, it was a though.

Spice

I would actually like a result display that lets me manage with links I see. I personally created a greasemonkey script that removes the links to News and Froogle, but I couldn't manage to get rid of the extra white space. I want to be able to determine which links I see.

Not really related to this particular UI test but to the UI tests in general: I know Google loves stats and knowing exactly how users react to changes in anything. However, I wonder how effective UI tests really are. I'm not seeing this new UI, but if I did, I would of course play around a whole bunch, click on everything, and try a bunch of tests to see the new functionality. I imagine most users would notice the changes and do the same thing. It seems like UI tests would always show different user behavior because people are getting used to the new UI. I wonder how they deal with this. Perhaps they target the UI tests to certain types of users. People that don't search often would probably not notice the change as reliably as people who search 30+ times a day. Maybe they measure how people reacted to previous UI tests when they first came out, compare that to when the UI change was finally rolled out and people's behavior settled down, and use that difference to subtract from the new behavior (I hope that makes sense).

Curious...
Andrew

does he (arjun) have a site flavoured google searchlet somehwere tagged to his userid ??

It's a better navigation. However, it didn't ever appear in my searches.

it appeared in my search results yesterday.

i didnt like it. in fact, i hated it

i really hope google dont implement this.