You've probably noticed that Google recently revised the look of their #1 listings for many search results. Beyond the normal snippet and URL, they now include a sub-group of options for each page, enabling users to better locate the content they actually need.

What's interesting about this is that Google may be shortening the 'long tail' of search. In other words, if Google can provide sub-options with relevant results for more different search intents within the results provided for the generic search, it may actually dissuade people from getting more and more specific with their search phrases.

So the benefit of (and difference between) searching for ‘order sirus’ and ‘sirius customer support’ and ‘compare Sirius radios’ vs just searching for ‘sirus’ goes down with the new listing format. Over the past five years people have been learning to search on longer and longer phrases to try and find more specific and relevant content. General terms still get the bulk of searches, but the tail had been getting longer. The actual quality of the results for the longer searches varies greatly, sometimes it's better but often times the result produced for a highly specific search is worse, which is a lot more frustrating.

In a purely academic sense, it would be better if users continued to build search phrases with more precision, and if the engines also continued to improve their targeted results. But the reality is that habits change slowly and if the engines can just offer an ‘intent menu’ under each relevant listing, this may improve the process for everyone. SEO’s now have to build intent cues into pages not so that they can get found for longer searches but instead so that the engines can correctly classify the available information.

I assume Google is tracking the clicks on these sub-results very closely. It would be great to see these rolled out for more than just the top listing.