Congratulations! You have been randomly selected to…
Feeling lucky? No, I didn’t win the lottery today <sigh>. I just happened to be randomly selected –along with other users– to take a sneak peek at the new design that Google appears to be currently testing for its results pages.

Check out this SERP screen-shot, showing non-underlined blue links (click on the image to see the whole page at full size):

Here's what the new SERP looks like: notice how the only underlined links are the (organic and paid) result titles, and the related search suggestions at the bottom.

Now compare the above with the regular look of the same SERP, shown in the following screen-shot (which I took after deleting cookies from the google.it domain in my browser):

...and here's your regular good ol' Google SERP: all links are underlined (looks familiar?)

Could you spot all the differences? In the test version of the SERP, all links are blue, but only some are underlined. But that’s not all: the vertical space between the anchor text and the underlying blue line has doubled (from 2 to 4 pixels, in my Firefox).

This results in less visual clutter (especially noticeable with local results, as shown in my screen-shots), and more legible links to organic and sponsored results.

As a side effect, the screen real estate occupied by each result is slightly increased: in the new SERP layout, each organic result takes an additional 4 pixels vertically. This, in turn, makes your standard 10-result page taller by about 3% (2052 vs. 1985 vertical pixels in the above examples), granting even more visibility to the top results (and pushing further down the less lucky followers).

Do you like the new SERP style? Looks good to you? Will it stick?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below. I’ll take care of forwarding them to Google (just kiddin’).

After reading the details of the deal Microsoft struck with Yahoo! today, it looks pretty clear to me that the only real winner is going to be Google in the long run. Here’s why.

First of all, I’m not at all convinced that advertisers will be more motivated to put their money into AdCenter, contrary to what some predicted. To be a leader in the search and search advertising market today is not just a matter of “technology”, “scale” and “salesforce”, as Steve Ballmer seems to think; it takes innovative ideas and a company full of brilliant and motivated people to deliver the most relevant results to searchers and the highest possible return on investment to advertisers. And there’s no way that Microsoft can become that company: search has never been (and will never be) their core business, and despite their late efforts and mammoth investments in human resources, technology and R&D over the years, they have failed to come up with a decent search product so far.

I also believe this partnership will not lead to a stronger player in the search engine scenario, because Yahoo! will soon stop innovating —which means death. Today is indeed a very sad day for Yahoo! Search (RIP), and for Yahoo! as a company as well. To license give away their core technology to Microsoft for ten years is not just a very bad deal for Yahoo!’s investors (which didn’t like today’s news very much); it’s mainly a colossal strategic mistake: it means to give up on search, excising the company’s cultural roots. Over the next two and a half years “many Yahoo! Search employees”, said Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz, “will be asked to take jobs at Microsoft”, while others will simply become “redundant”. Well, if I were a Yahoo! Search engineer today, confronted by the perspective of having to choose between getting nuked and surrendering to assimilation by Microsoft, I would already be exploring my alternatives.

To Google’s ears, Yahoo!’s backdown from the search battlefield must sound like excellent news, essentially because there’s going to be one less competitor in that arena. They won’t have to ditch any plan or alter their strategy. In fact, they don’t have much to worry about, except staying focused on their true mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and monetizable.

The search battle is over, true. But Google won a long time ago.

Trying to decide whether Bing‘s results quality sucks more than Live Search’s did, or just about the same…

Sample Bing SERP (with spam)

No, I’m not going to delete my Google Toolbar for now.