Google introduced a new, early-stage experiment for finding sites that are easy to read… finally it’s official that they incorporate the web-design into the search algos…

Last year google search engineers already explained that they use "VIPS technology":http://www.marketingfan.com/a/search-engines/google-engineers-on-link-value-vips-flash-duplicate-content-and-crawler-budget.php to analyze sites and it’s obviously used to value links based on their location (you want to get "links in content":http://www.presellpageman.com , do you?)

The Google Accessible Search adds a small twist to how search results are returned. the most relevant results are sorted based on the simplicity of their page layouts.

So today, when users search from the Accessible search "site":http://labs.google.com/accessible, they’ll receive results that are prioritized based on their usability. WOW… did you read THAT? search results based on usability… that’s cool!

They look at a number of "usability signals" by examining the HTML markup found on a web page.

It favors

• pages with few visual distractions
• pages that are likely to render well with images turned off

Interesting to read that Google Accessible Search is built on "Google Co-op’s technology":http://www.marketingfan.com/a/communities/google-coop-how-to-add-your-links-to-the-google-premium-spots.php that I just released that "realtime RSS converter":http://www.marketingfan.com/a/rss-marketing/realtime-rss-to-google-coop-converter.php for…

So this is a great new feature – and a LOT to rethink when doing search engine optimization. Takes this idea vice-versa you can think of a search result penalty if your site is designed poorly or overloaded and cluttered… way time to get some really cool web-designers, eh?

and, as you can see from the links to the Google post, it already got a lot buzz

  New! Google "Accessible Search" 

  Google Accessibility Search 

  Google Accessible Search

  google accessible search 

  Google making it even easier to search 

  A ‘New’ Google Search – Are You a Simpleton? 

  Google Accessible Search 

  Google’s accessible search

  Finding easy-to-read web content 

  Find easy-to-read web sites with Google Accessible Search 

  Google steps forward

[via Official Google Blog: Finding easy-to-read web content]: