Google Starts Rolling Out Massive Redesign

Google is finally starting to roll out the massive revamp of the search engine it’s been toiling at for several months now. A redesigned homepage and search results page have been spotted in the wild for about six months now and the redesign will be delivered to all users today. It’s a graduate process, so you may not get the new homepage just yet.

The redesign is an overhaul of most, if not, all of the elements and components of both the homepage and the search results page. It also applies to specialized search engines like image or video search. It’s still very much a Google interface, everything is kept to a minimum and it tries its best not to distract you from the task at hand.

That being said, the new pages are a lot livelier and more colorful. The famous Google logo is also getting a new coat of paint. The colors are more saturated and it loses most of its shading, opting for a flatter look. It also loses the TM trademark logo. Variants of this new, colorful logo have been popping up for quite some time and it remains to be seen whether this big push will mean that the venerable Google logo will be put to rest for good after more than a decade of faithful service.

As far as usability goes, the biggest change is the permanent left sidebar that accompanies all searches. It’s just a rethinking of the existing Options sidebar, which is accessible through the ‘Show options’ link in the search results page. Its main use will be as a filtering system enabling users to narrow down their search to just images, videos, news and any other category that Google has a dedicated search engine for.

The sidebar will also enable you to cull the results to just those from the past week or other periods of time. There are plenty of other, more subtle changes. Google expects the new design to be live for all English language users by the end of the week. An official announcement should be coming soon. UPDATE: The official word is here.