I know I’m late with this one, especially considering that I had a sneak preview a few weeks ago but the new Google layout sucks (These people all agree). You may not have stumbled across it yet. It seems like it hasn’t completely been rolled out yet. Truth be told, you may not even have noticed it but I have and every single change is ridiculous.
- Permanent search options in the left sidebar
- I guess you could turn on these options before but I never did because they are useless. The options are supposed to be relevant to your search term but they already existed at the top of the page. The left sidebar just takes up room and when ads also display on the right, the content space is minuscule.
- Different search bar and button styles.
- The new style is very angular and stylized in such a way that it blends in awkwardly, even though the search bars are larger than they were before. It took me a while to even realize there still is a search bar on the bottom.
- New logo
- The new logo has some subtle colour alterations as well as a more muted bevel and drop shadow effect. It’s supposed to look smoother but instead looks like something someone thought would look good 15 years ago. This is especially odd because Google’s old logo certainly wasn’t “modern.”
- Rearranged results
- Maybe I’d be okay with every other change if the results appeared the same but they don’t. If you’re the type of person who skipped over the ads above your actual results, you could be missing the most relevant links. Plus,media (video, images, Twitter) and news content is not featured like it used to me. This forces you to click a link on the left (or top). Adding extra clicks is frustrating to me.
- No division between search and results
- There used to be a horizontal, blue bar which ran right under the search bar to separate the content. I don’t know why is feels so crucial to have the bar there but, without it, Google seems like a half-assed attempt at design from a middle schooler.
I’m also not entirely sure, but it seems as though the results are displayed in a much smaller font, too.
But I’d like to leave you with this comment I stumbled upon because it’s so very fitting:
I think it looks good and it’s very efficient. I’m a big fan of whitespace and the new sidebar provides plenty of it! I also like duplication so if a meteor ever smashes into my house and takes out the top of my monitor, I’ll still have this sweet sidebar with the exact same links ready to go. And did you see those bright, blazing, colorful icons next to the links? Wow…now that’s some eye candy! I’m hoping in future releases, they’ll expand the sidebar further to the right and give the user an option of hiding the search results to show more sidebar. That would be awesome.