New Google Interface

Rumours have been circulating about Google launching a revamped version of its famously minimalistic search interface. Well looks like this is the case &, as reported in Gizmodo, it’s possible to see this for yourself by opening Google.com and  pasting some JavaScript into your web browser’s URL address field. Note it doesn’t seem to work for www.google.co.nz at this stage.

If you can’t be bothered doing that, below are screen shots showing the old & new interfaces side by side. As you’ll see the new one has a cleaner looking logo & brighter buttons. The key difference however is once you’ve done a search.

In the new interface the search options automatically get presented down the left hand side of the search results page, whereas in the current version these options remain hidden unless clicked on. This is an interesting enhancement &, on reflection, not surprising.

Last week at the Search Engine Room Conference in Sydney Justin Baird, an “Innovationist” for Google (cool job title), gave an interesting presentation entitled Search – Personalisation, Localisation, Portability. Something he highlighted was the fact Google gives users the option of refining searches by clicking on the “+ show options” link at the top of search results.

However when I asked him during the Q&A session how many users actually refined their searches this way his answer, whilst not explicit, indicated few normal users do. Reading between the lines it sounded like it’s a feature only SEOs & other advanced users use.

I’m guessing this is likely to change with Google making these search options very prominent in the new interface.

Below are screen shots of the current & new interface. The left hand column has the old current interface & the right hand column the new interface (click images to enlarge).