Google may be testing displaying images thumbnails on the left side of the search result snippets. At first, when Kunjan Shah sent this to me on Twitter, I thought it was a Google bug. But then others like Brent D. Payne showed it to me on YouTube as well and I am thinking now Google might be testing this.

Here is the screenshot from Kunjan Shah:

Here is Brent’s video:

I was told there are no browser extensions at play here but I obviously cannot confirm that without gaining access to their machines. So either this is a Google test, a Google bug, or some weird browser extension causing a mess here. It just doesn’t look good to me.

Last week we spotted Google testing the navigation tools on the left side of the search results as well.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Update: Here are more variations of this screen captured by Frank Sandtmann, a German based SEO:

More examples: