The new side bar definitely helps a lot. I still like the BING image search though.. still seems slightly better & smoother.
I did'nt like the new layout either. Previous one was way better, and this one looks way over crowded.
I hope they changed the algo a bit because the Imagebot pillages one of my sites. It reaps havoc on it ... 45gb a month just to Google Image bot. Fingers crossed they tidied it up with this update.