Mountain View, California — Google users are grumbling over what appears to be a part of the test group of users that the Internet search engine giant Google has been using as digital guinea pigs for a redesign of its search results page, which features a new color scheme along with a lot more white space.
Unfortunately, there is no way to self-select, but for those ill-starred ones that are not getting the special Google treatment, here is what the new search results pages looks like. The search engine giant explained it is doing what is sometimes referred to as a “bucket test” — experimenting with changes by only making them visible to some users.
Although the changes in the new search results page are not dramatic, yet one can easily notice from the screenshot above that the redesigned results page comprises a tweaked color scheme. The greens, purples and blues are not as harsh as the current set of colors used on Google.com.
In addition, Google’s search pages that are a included this test is a lot more spacious and inevitably, displays fewer search results per page: Particularly, Google has revised the spacing between the results it delivers to increase the total white space and line of text, the familiar blue links are no longer underlined, and each item is now separated by a dotted line in the new design of the search results page itself. The linings that were earlier seen under each search result mysteriously disappeared.
he most peculiar thing regarding the new test page is that it provides much less information on the screen. Gone are the familiar “cached” and “similar” links — tools that empowered a user to obtain related pages and “snapshots” of pages that have been saved by Google in the event that the actual link was down for any reason. This indicates that one will have to do more scrolling and paging through results to unearth what they are looking for.
A few different versions of Google’s under-wrapped tweaked search results page are allegedly out in the open right now such as the one below.
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Click to enlarge… (Image Credit: Twitpic: Ian Chan)
Interestingly, Google probably assumes that by now its users know how to work around a search results page, and page titles are now just displayed in a larger blue font overtop the page’s one-to-two-line description.
However, the redesign has provoked the (occasionally profanity-laced) ire of many users on Twitter and elsewhere on the Web, with a critic at TechCrunch declaring it “ugly“. When asked about the changes, a distressed Twitterer said, “What the heck was wrong with the old design?”
Significantly, the search engine giant is accumulating data on how its millions of users react to the changes to determine if it should make the changes permanent or not.