It seems something new is testing something new in the Google search results (SERPs, or search result pages).
When searching and certain keyword results appear with sitelinks, a separate search bar will be shown above those sitelinks.
While searching for Oracle, this appeared:
See the search bar below the first result, just above the sitelinks? That’s new in the SERP. The Google search results are being finetuned all the time of course, with result pages sometimes showing 7 instead of 10 results per page, and also no ads instead of the regular set of ads.
Google Search Results shows more search bars
To see if this was a one off result or if this happened to other keywords to, I tested ‘Campaign Monitor’ and ExactTarget’ in the Google search results.
Guess what: those keywords showed the search bar just as well. And again, between the first result and the site links.
Campaign Monitor:
And ExactTarget:
When using the separate search box, a new Google search will be done with the flag site:(site-url). This is a way to use Google search I use more and more often, to search within a site. Mostly because search on a website itself is limited, or sometimes even unavailable.
While some of you might not find this very interesting or important, remember that Google’s mission is to make information as easily accessible as possible on the web. If this means an extra search bar to help you get to the actual search results you -really- are looking for faster, then it’ll be called a success in Google‘s book.
Have you come across the new search bar already? Let us know in the comments.
