Mountain View, California — Google did not invent search, but it is one of the most valuable terminus a quo for more than 1 billion Google searches a day, is getting its most substantial renovation in years. The Mountain View, Calif., search engine leader is rolling out a major redesign for its search results on Wednesday, indicating the start of what promises to be a period of intensified competition with rival Microsoft Bing.
However, there is no need to be concerned about: The company is only changing the function, look and feel of its search and results pages — even one of the world’s most familiar logos is about to look a bit different.
Nevertheless, there will be real changes coming to its results pages, offering new navigational tools that will automatically customize themselves to individual searches, enlarging its search box, and following the lead of other search engines that display their results in three vertical columns.
Consumers can just relax now and reap the rewards. “Only two search-engine players are spending heavily right now, Google and Microsoft,” says Kevin Lee, CEO of search consultancy firm Didit.com. “The end users will be the beneficiaries of this highly competitive landscape.”
Citing the modification a “spring transformation” in its official blog, Google is even tweaking the look of its colorful logo — the first considerable alteration since 1999 in the bouncy blue, red, yellow and green logo originally designed by co-founder Sergey Brin.
“We want Google to maintain its simple appearance,” Patrick Riley, technical lead for Web search at the Mountain View search engine company, said of the changes to the results page, which will be gradually phased in globally this week. “We were trying to focus on a clean and simple and modern look. That is what many of the changes on the results page were about.”
The important part about this new development is that Google now considers it knows what sort of thing you are looking for — so the options change according to the particular search.
Of course, under the hood, Google is anything but simple, and the most significant changes are functional. Rather than a crisp list of pages related to a user’s query ranged against the left-hand side of the screen, now a new bar has appeared. At first glance it appears to simply offer some simple options to limit which search results are visible — so if you searching for “string theory,” it will offer “images,” “news,” “video” and more.
Google’s new search results page offers options on the left based on search topics.
Another new tool, “Something Different” offers a selection of related subjects — a search for “Rolling Stones,” for example, offers a “Something Different” result of aging rockers Aerosmith, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. But search, say, for shoes, and you will find that “shopping” appears as an option, as does the opportunity to limit results by colour.
On the left-hand panel of results, users will now see a toolbar that enables them to select results for news, blogs, images and other categories, Google wrote in a post on its official blog. Besides, the modifications to the logo are crafty, and include dropping the “TM” from the tail of “Google,” a change Riley said was made to better emphasize its simplicity of design. Google also removed shading around the logo’s six letters, brightening them into simpler shapes with “softer gradients.”
The refurbishment comes in the wake of Microsoft’s successful launch last June of Bing, a revamped version of its Windows Live search service. Few expected Bing to succeed as well as it has. Bing is now used for 11.7% of U.S. searches, up nearly 4 percentage points since its launch, according to comScore. Google continues to dominate with a 65% share.
“They are positively responding to the competition,” added Ray Valdes, an analyst with Gartner. “It is necessary; in fact, one might even say it is overdue.”
Part of the goal, Riley said, is to make Google feel easier to use by having more uniformity in the look of the results page across different kinds of searches. “When people end up on blog search for the first time, they are not going to have to figure out how this thing works, because it is going to work like Google,” Riley said.
“I feel like it has made Google a bit more contemporary — a bit more 2010-ish if you will,” said Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Land, a website that follows the search business. Like other observers, he praised the utility of the new navigational tools.
Here is a video of Googlers explaining the new design: