Bench Testing Another Personalized Search Interface Change

[Brett_Tabke]

[flickr.com...]

[infoworld.com...]

Something similar popped up at the time that google rolled out the personalized search option.

It appears that Google is going to try "search scout" again?

(search scout was in early beta versions of Google in 1999)

[jcmoon]

Google Blogoscoped has a post from 1/26/06 showing another screenshot for a different search query. The "Inside Google" blog on blognewschannel has a screenshot for yet another query. I first saw this Wednesday, and only around mid-day when using my Apple laptop at home. While at work, I never saw this SERP style again until last night, when I saw it for all queries ... and now, we're back to the normal SERPs.

When I first saw this I assumed the green bars were a signal to the relevance of the results therein (like a PageRank for a SERP), though it's also been postulated they indicate the number of results.

While this is an interesting change, it may need some explanation to average users if it is to be used globally (say, put a small explanation in a box, or a what's-this link, etc).

Also, since it leads to and gives some apparent measure of Image, Local, News, etc searches from a normal Web search, does this mean it'll be plugged into the Image SERPs, News SERPs, and perhaps Local SERPs as well (thus pointing to a Web SERP, as well as the others)? While this might be a helpful addition to those SERPs, it may be more difficult to integrate it into their design (esp. the Local SERPs).

And here's a wild idea ... for users who're logged-in and already do personal search, personal homepage, etc, could google also show a link & bar-graph for Desktop Search, too? I'm sure Redmond would go crazy over that. But, I'm probably getting too far ahead of things for now.

Has anyone else seen this?