Old Carousel SERP Features?
If you’ve spent time in the collegiate field searching for “top universities” or for today’s news, “best universities”, you might be used a “carousel” of results showing up at the top like this:
*Obviously, this isn’t a “best universities” search, but it no longer has the same carousel. Thus, the other term for elucidation.
New 2022 Carousel SERP Feature?
Basically, the set of results is no longer side to side where you can scroll horizontally and the results extend to the right. Now, you get 9 rectangular blocks and if you want to learn about others defined as potential results of the search (i.e., other “best universities”), you click on the “42 more” button in the middle and see the rest:
For the above example, the search “museums in London”, you’ll see they also updated that as well to this new format.
However, not all searches are created equal. Some of the old carousels for phrases like “famous people”:
OLD “famous people” SERP:
…are not featuring this new form of “carousel”, but simply showing an image pack from the top result — not exactly a featured snippet — and the People also ask SERP feature with 6 regular results followed by the video pack and 2 more regular results.
NEW “famous people” SERP:
But we did find one that did resemble the old style of “carousels.” Here’s the “Space Jam 2” search in the old days (literally could mean yesterday):
…where you might see the movie show up in a carousel of movies. What we didn’t think about at the time is the list of actors in the cast below. Today, the SERP has the old style of carousel still giving us a chance to scroll horizontally through at least the cast:
Is it still the “Carousel” SERP Feature?
If you define “carousel”, you will learn the term includes “rotation” and other meanings that semantically lead to movement or the ability to move.
However, with this new format, it sort of acts like an accordion opening up to all 51 results.
We exhibit this in a little video we created showing this behavior around 3:00 minutes.
New Name for Carousels SERP Feature? Item List?
If you do any research around the topic and even google “carousel serp feature,” one of the top results (and not sure why it’s not at the top) is from Google Search Central. It describes the carousel and interestingly calls it an “ItemList”. While it highlights all the aspects of it acting like the old way, we obviously have seen the new “accordion” style that exists in today’s SERPs.
Check it out yourself. Here are some of the search permutations we’ve noticed this new “ItemList” or Accordion or 2022 Carousel SERP Feature is showing up in:
- a list celebrities
- best actors
- best actresses
- best universities
- cities in the world
- museums in london/france/new york (seems like any city)
- top boarding schools
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