In case you have not noticed, today Google has changed the look and feel of its website. the homepage buttons have a new, sleek feel to them. The search box has a shadowing effect now. Even the top navigation options appear after the page has loaded. This is to increase site speed, something that will soon play a huge part in the Google search engine algorithm.
Also the search result page changes its look and feel. There are new options on the right side navigation that may seem new to most users, but in reality are just moved from the top header into the right column. This is to make them more prevalent and easy to use for the users. It looks like Google is trying to change its look to resemble that of Bing’s search results. It should be interesting to see how the changes play out for Google and if they make any new changes.
From the look of things, I suspect that Google will continue to push out changes and updates to the search engine results page, until they have the perfect mix of organic results and paid listings. Why gice up so much room and condense the search results? This only means less advertising space or less organic search results. Most likely it will be the latter. Lets just wait and see what the future has in store for searchers.