Grab the Shoehorn! Google Adds Forum Posts to Crowded Search Results

Give it another couple of years and no one will remember the phrase "ten blue links"–especially if Google has its way.

The Google search results page is already looking cluttered these days–box results, news item, videos, book results, profiles–now Google wants to add deep links to forum posts to the crowded mix.

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 an example of how it will look:

Now, I know that Google doesn’t roll out anything that adds clutter to its streamlined design, unless it has been rigorously tested and proved valuable, but I wonder just how much more Google can cram in. How much more content can it add to search results before it goes too far–and gives us so many options that we get overwhelmed?