With Google’s newly redesigned SERP pages, users don't have any choice but to notice the options that are available. They're not too different from Bing or Yahoo but the difference is that way more people search with Google on a regular basis.
The new SERPs are likely to shake up SEO efforts, simply because users will start going to the different options Google provides them, taking them to different sets of results. Now that the options are clear to see, users are more likely to use them.
When Yahoo added features to their left-hand navigation bar, engagement increased. So we can't imagine why Google wouldn't also see an engagement increase for certain features that are now more visible. What it's going to come down to is evaluating the different options for any given query that you wish to rank for, and focusing efforts upon those.
The options in the left panel pulls in everything including: classic Google results, blogs from Google Blog Search, Books from Google Books (which includes magazines), Images from Google Image Search, News from Google News, Maps from Google Maps, Shopping from Google Product Search, Videos from Google Video (which includes videos from YouTube and other sources), and Updates from Google's real-time search.
That last one is particularly interesting because before users generally only saw Google's real-time search in action on select queries unless they hunted them down. Real-time search for any query is now much more accessible, which makes real-time search a bigger deal for search marketing.
The new SERPs also place much more emphasis on social search results. The same goes for location. Google has also taken an interest in engaging in conversation throughout the web so forum participation could be a valuable use of your time.
What it comes down to though is how you, through all of Google's different search engines, can get more traffic from Google. Traffic to sites listed in any of these should look forward to a significant increase. Just think; if Yahoo was seeing increased engagement, imagine what Google will attract.
