Here are the dangers of imitation: Google has rolled out a new search results page. When I search for vitamin water, I get video and products results in the right-hand sidebar. This is a variation on AOL's old FullView search results — a design AOL labored over and then discarded in favor of blindly copying Google. The design is moderately helpful for me, as I was trying to find an online distributor for Vitaminwater. Not all of my colleagues see the new results, so Google may be slowly rolling this out from datacenter to datacenter. As for AOL? Having abandoned the idea of innovation in search, it now finds itself needing to copy Google just to get back to where it started. Full screenshot is below the jump.

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