Google have announced a change to their search engine results page (SERP) with additional forum links being shown for certain queries. From the Official Google blog:

This new addition to Google search results applies to sites that tend to have a large number of posts on a specific topic. When several different discussions on a site are relevant to your query, we indent them under the primary result and include the date of each post.

Here’s a screenshot of how these results can appear:

There’s been some interesting discussion surrounding this feature, with Andy Beal from Marketing Pilgrim raising concerns that Google’s SERPs page may be getting too cluttered. He argues that nobody will remember the phrase “ten blue links” in a few years with so much content now on Google’s first page of results.

To give you an idea of what he’s talking about, here’s a screenshot of a search for “iphone headphones”:

As you can see, this page is getting quite long and cluttered. In the example above, the homepage now has 18 links to separate content including forums, websites, video and news.

Do you agree with Andy’s comments or have you found this feature useful? Let us know in the comments below.