Weird Google Indented Search Results

What I searched:

http://www.google.com/search?q=irfanview+clickfire

Don’t ask why I searched Google for irfanview clickfire the other day, but the results I received surprised me. I’d seen the rare Google double indented search results, but never more than two results per search query appear. What’s going on here?

A few observations come to mind.

• All the results come from the www and not the blog or news subdomains (all 3 contain content about Irfanview)
• The indented results are missing the URL, cached link, and similar pages link commonly returned.
• The results could be replicated during the browser session with similar terms. Later, however, I was not able to reproduce them.
• 3 out of 4 of the  snippet portions of the results (normally the description meta tag or abstract) appear to show items from the global clickfire menus (top, left column).

It almost looks like Google is trying to show similar results, but from within the site itself.

Any thoughts on these types of results? Seen this before?

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“Weird Google Indented Search Results” has 10 Comments

1. SEO Pakistan Says:
   October 16th, 2009 at 10:29 am

   its showing all the site links man and having site means Google have good trust over you.

2. SearchCap: The Day In Search, October 16, 2009 Says:
   October 16th, 2009 at 2:59 pm

   [...] Weird Google Indented Search Results, ClickFire [...]

3. Andrew Weisman Says:
   October 25th, 2009 at 6:25 am

   Hi.. I already read a blog who was having this same issue. Anyway, I really don’t know the reason behind that. I enjoyed browsing your blog.

   Anyway, do you know when is the next Google PR update?

   Thanks.. Keep on posting nice entry..

4. Emory Rowland Says:
   October 25th, 2009 at 9:17 am

   Andres, I’d be interested in seeing more examples of these results. So far, I haven’t found an explanation.

   I think a PR update is due, but I’d be suprised if Google keeps Toolbar PR for very much longer.

5. Darvin @ recyclingchristmascard.com Says:
   November 1st, 2009 at 4:10 pm

   I always understood the indenting to be a good thing. I thought it meant that Google considered the site to be an “authority”…

   I could be wrong though.

6. Emory Rowland Says:
   November 1st, 2009 at 7:06 pm

   Yeah, I take the usual double indented results as a good thing and authoritative in the sense that both pages are ranking.

7. Basin Says:
   November 7th, 2009 at 12:00 am

   I saw that too, there is some weird algorithm changing going on. I have been noticing a lot of rank volatility recently. This is something I noticed on yahoo search too…I think they are working on changing the backend to work more like the google sandbox test site.

8. flek Says:
   November 14th, 2009 at 11:42 am

   Yeah, you are very correct. I could also see some weird SERPs. Not sure what ‘s going wrong..

9. lockerz invite Says:
   November 19th, 2009 at 8:44 pm

   This is strange… I just tried it in google and I get the same result as you.

10. Darvin @ Recycling Christmas Card Says:
    November 20th, 2009 at 6:21 pm

    Has anyone made any further discoveries related to this indented listing trend?

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