Google had been randomly releasing test pages for its upcoming three-column search results page. There isn’t too much buzz about it yet because many of you probably haven’t seen it. But my boyfriend has just randomly been bestowed the honor of testing out this new page by the Google Gods. Or some random algorithm. Yeah, I’m pretty jealous.
Here is a screenshot of this new Google search results page:
So far, here are the differences I can see:
- Categories – Upon searching for “peanut butter,” the categories Everything, News, Books, Images, and a more button appear on top of the new left-hand column. This varies by search, much like Bing’s current functionality, and can be expanded to include Shopping, Blogs, Video, Maps, and Forums.
- Search Filters – You can choose to search based on when a web page or article was published, whether it was published nearby, whether you’ve visited the page yet, to show more or fewer shopping sites, etc.
- Related queries – There is a new “Not entirely unlike” section in the lower left-hand column which includes similar terms you might be interested in. Looks like Bing has lost it’s value prop as a “decision engine”.
- Preview pages – There is an option to preview pages within the search results, which actually allows you to see a thumbnail of each search result’s webpage. This. Is. Awesome.
- Wonder Wheel – This has the potential to be awesome, although it’s sort of inaccurate for very specific search queries (I just tried it for one of my clients, and it came up with some completely unrelated results). But the results for “peanut butter” are very relevant.
Let’s zoom in on that Wonder Wheel:
- It’s pretty – Maybe it’s the icons on the top-left, or maybe the letters in “Google” are more vibrant (seriously, I think the second O is more yellow). But it just looks so bright and cheerful, doesn’t it? And they have tweaked the logo a bit; you can see that the shadow is gone, and the yellow really does look more vibrant:
New Google Logo
Original Google Logo
What do you think of the new Google search results page?
Follow me on Twitter if you like the fact that the first thing I thought to search for was “peanut butter”.
