Ever start scrolling down the search results on mobile, only to realize you want to go back to one of the top results or to refine the query?  Google is experimenting with a new way to make it easier for searchers to do that on mobile – with a new “Back to top” button.

Here is what it looks like:

This is something that people have likely seen while on other sites on a mobil,

The possible impact of this change could be significant.  It looks like it appears about halfway down the results, which means if a searcher doesn’t find what they are looking for in the top half of the results, they might click to return to the top and do a new search.  Or they could click to the top if they decide that one of the better results actually was one of the top results and they would like to go to one of those sites.

Sergey Alakov spotted the test on Chrome in iOS.  I wasn’t able to replicate it, so it seems to be a limited usability test for user experience.

However, making it active in iOS is interesting, because iOS users can already touch the top of the page, which will automatically take them back up to the top, so there is a bit of redundancy there.  But for Android users, there is nothing similar.

I suspect some SEOs will have some very strong feelings about this, especially if they rank near the bottom of the results, rather than the top.