Excitingly billed as a “spring metamorphosis,” Google have unveiled a new look to their search pages.
This “metamorphosis” is apparently “responding to the increasing richness of the web and the increasing power of search,” and now serves up search tools on the left hand navigation, backed by various layout tweaks and graphic refreshes throughout.
Side panel ahoy!
A new side panel highlights the most relevant search tools and refinements for your query. Here’s how Google explain the changes:
The top section of the new left-hand panel builds on Universal Search by suggesting the most relevant genres of results for your query and letting you seamlessly switch to these different types of results. The “Everything” option remains our essential search experience with different types of results integrated into the main results, but now you can also easily switch to just the particular type of results you are looking for.
Our expandable Search Options panel launched last spring brought many rich slice-and-dice tools to search. The new left-hand navigation showcases these tools and enables you to get a different view of your results. Perhaps you’d like to see images from each of the results or just the newest information? These options are all on the left, and our technology will suggest the tools that are most relevant and helpful to your query.
Google Squared (available on Google Labs) helps you find and compare entities. Our “Something different” feature builds on the technology in Google Squared to find other entities that are related to your query, so you can easily explore not only the results for your current query but other related topics.
Subtle tweaks
Less obvious are subtle changes to Google’s colour palette and logo, while the overall design sticks to the company’s winning lean’n’mean minimalistic ethos.
We can’t see any changes yet, but Google say that they’re rolling out the new interface globally from today.
Check out the video below to see what you can expect.
