Google is testing a new category filtering carousel for some search queries.  And while the intent is good, the actual results make Google search results even worse.

Here is what it looks like for a search:

However, the narrowing down doesn’t quite seem to work.  It only narrows it down to product type, without adding the important filtering keyword “kids” to it.

The images are taken from the knowledge panel it appears – for example, that swimsuit image is on the inappropriate side for showing when you search for “kids clothing.”  When you click through, you see this:

The images, and the shopping ads, are not at all suitable for a child!  It also filters the same way for “baby clothing” with the swimsuit image and filtering.  Even the organic results are primarily targeting sexy swimwear for women, not children.  In fact, none of those organic results are for children at all.

They are having some filtering issues from the breadcrumb perspective too.  When you narrow down a category, for some reason it filters the carousel through “Children’s television series” which isn’t relevant.

It isn’t showing just for kids.  It is even showing for “dog clothing”  as well:

Here, the intent if you could click the raincoat in the carousel and see dog raincoasts (as shown in the Product Listing Ads), it would be a great feature.  But again, Google drops the important “dog” part of the keyword phrase and shows raincoats for humans.

It is interesting in that it doesn’t show for women’s or men’s clothing, an area where it would actually be useful since Google is dropping the mens/womens/kids/girls from the search query.

It does show them for mobile as well:

This is definitely an interesting feature, but it really, really needs some work for it to actually add something to the search results.  Right now, the use of filtering actually makes the results much, much worse and does make me question whether this was actually even tested at all.

This seems to be live for all users.

Thank you to Ramesh Singh for sending the heads up to The SEM Post.