Google.com is getting a redesign, perhaps the biggest in history. Considering Google's reluctance to change anything on the homepage or search results page and its predilection to test every small change in excruciating detail, it's understandable that the engineers and designers are taking their sweet time testing and tweaking the rather radical new design. After several months in the wild, though, it looks like Google is ramping up testing of the new look and more people seeing it.

Search Engine land has spotted one of the latest test variations of the design and, though there aren't any radical changes from the previous iterations, as one would expect, there are a few updates and new small features. The new homepage and search results page design Google is testing is an evolution of the Google design, more than a decade in the making.

Yet, though it has all the Google fingerprints on it, it's probably the biggest leap forward both visually and in terms of functionality. Everything looks a lot fresher and livelier, thanks in no small part to the brighter blue used through the pages. It's a small but very effective change. On the practical side, the biggest change is the new three-panel layout. It's nothing that you can't get today, but instead of clicking show options to get access to the filters and specialized search tools, they're all available by default in the new design.

There have been a few tweaks though, for one, thankfully, the horrible bright blue search buttons are gone, being replaced by much more stylish silver ones. It's very likely that there are other nips and tucks around various design elements. One change that is just visual tweak, but an interesting one nonetheless, is the use of 'chevrons' instead of buttons when expanding various components of the page, exactly like the YouTube redesign also in testing.

The design has been updated as well to include tools which weren't available on Google when the test was first introduced. Notably, both the real-time and the very new location searches are now represented. For the real-time search, things are like you'd expect, among the various filters you'll find the option to show just those results labeled 'Updates'. For the location feature, things get interesting, though, as it is displayed prominently in the right upper corner under the total number of results. It also looks like there's a drop-down menu associated with it so you can select a new location or refine the current one.