14 DAY TRIAL // Mind you that Google's top "selling" product is still its search engine and that is its main revenue source is its ad selling, so it should be continuously working to improve it, in order to keep its users satisfied and encourage further usage. It sounds like a lot of demagogy, I know, but so do the people over at the Mountain View based company, so they are just doing the job without talking the talk.
We're just benefiting from their work and to be honest, that suits me well, that somebody else does the work and I just get the results handed to me on a silver platter? or white background, it's roughly the same thing. The latest idea the dev team had was to unclutter the search results by not displaying everything on the left, thumbnails of pictures or photos tagged with the search keyword along with text. So, they moved the thumbnails on the right, as you can see in the picture on the left.
Except the reason mentioned, others might include them wanting to accommodate for ever-growing screen resolutions (so what will it be in five years' time, four columns due to that very same reason?), turning users to think of the right side of the search results page as relevant for their searches, too, and turn their attention to it - an ad scheme, that's where ads are usually displayed.
Other than that, Philipp Lenssen thinks that they might be thinking about pushing their services instead of others': YouTube to be preferred over Metacafe, Checkout over PayPal and so on. Either way, I appreciate that they have not settled to be the ever growing search engine and give up working on it. Yesterday's AdSense scrollbar and today's right side results make me wonder about what tomorrow may bring.