Google has always been a believer in small, frequent updates over big changes and revamps. Not that it doesn't do the latter, it's now in the process of deploying an universal design across all of its sites, but some of the best things about Google services have come from small, constant updates.
One perfect example is a change
signaled by Google Operating System, Google search now highlights whether a search result is in itself a search results page on another site.
This has probably happened to anyone that has ever used Google. You search for something rather obscure and you don't see many relevant results until you stumble upon one that sounds promising.
It contains your exact query and seems to be exactly what you were looking for, that is, until you click on it and you discover that it's actually just a search page with irrelevant results or sometimes no results at all.
There are countless websites trying to cash in on this, by saving copies of the results page generated for any query. This page is then indexed by Google which, in the past, treated it just like any other page.
It's an example of just the kind of low quality result that Google has been trying hard to remove from its search results in the past few months.
Which is why it now highlights that the result is a search page itself, by displaying a counter of how many results there are on that page, something along the lines of "4000 items" or "Results 1 - 12 of 859" in the search snippets.
It's a small change, but it can save a lot of time. If you want answers not another search page, you're not going to click on that result. On the other hand, perhaps a search on a specialized site is exactly what you need, in which case you now have a count of how many results to expect.
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