14 DAY TRIAL // Google's highly anticipated homepage redesign has just gone live for a bunch of more people. As expected for such a big change, Google has been testing the new homepage and search results page for several months, making tweaks and adjustments based on the user feedback it got from early testers. Now, it seems that Google is satisfied enough with the state of the major redesign, that it's rolling out to a lot more users, from the looks of Twitter, but it's still not ready for a full launch.
When it comes to design, especially that of its search engine, Google is very conservative and carefully weighs even the smallest tweak. With that in mind, the new Google homepage is a huge revamp, with everything getting updated, modified or tweaked. And the results are quite stunning, the new homepage is absolutely gorgeous, even as it maintains Google's well-known minimalistic approach.
Front and center is, as always, the Google logo, which is also getting a visual revamp with a little less shading and brighter colors. We've been seeing the new logo for a few months now, it's been popping up in a number of places, and it's a real improvement over the classic Google logo, which, after more than a decade, is getting really stale.
The search box is a lot sharper with some very fine defining lines. The change is subtle, but of great effect. Finally, for the third main area that shows up when you load the homepage, the "Google Search" and "I'm Feeling Lucky" buttons don't rely on the native UI of the operating system like before and come with a very nice silver gradient background. Finally, all the other links on the homepage also look a lot better and there is a small border between the menu links at the top of the page and the rest, very much like YouTube's newly launched redesign.
The search results page is featuring the three-panel layout we talked about before, which is pretty much the same as activating the Search Options in the regular Google search results page. The left sidebar also features a dynamic categories listing allowing you to filter your results to just Images, Videos, Blogs, and so on. And to show that Google engineers have a funny side just like the rest of us, there are also a couple of Easter eggs thrown in there for good measure, though they're likely part of the massive April Fools at Google, as the fact that the search time is now measured in epochs, centons, lamb's tail, gigawatts and other units that will have geeks giggling and others left puzzled.
