A spring metamorphosis — Google’s new look

googleblog.blogspot.com

25 points·madh··10 comments

The bad thing about A/B testing is that you can’t really surprise your most devoted users with a new look :)

I was somewhat confused by this post - I've had the left hand nav for weeks now

I still don't have it!

Same. I found the option to add the cookie for this new design about 2 months ago, been using it since.

I mostly like that the drop shadow on the logo is gone. I'm so shallow.

Looks nice, but now the list of services (images, videos...) are shown twice - at the top and on the left. Not exactly the minimalistic Google we've come to love. I say do it only on the left.

Search for "Paris", see the navigation on the left with "Maps", click on it and the navigation vanishes. If people cannot trust a navigation to always be there after the click, they will consider your creation baffling and difficult to use.

Both of these things would have unlikely happened at Apple. They happen here because Google's main process is "lots of A/B tests by regular folks", and regular folks just aint nitpicky and anal enough to complain about 99%. Oh well.

Your point is valid, but the need to compare to Apple and the reliance on the standard "Google relies on testing too much for its own good" is wearing thin.

It's nice, but I want a way to get the old look back...

Very Bing-like

This can be a good thing. Regardless, its good to see that competition is doing its job by forcing the leader to innovate what was a relatively static search page.

I see that for now they dropped the location widget under the search box.

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