David Flynn07 May 2010, 7:34 AM
Google Australia rolled out its revamped and slightly Bing-like search results page overnight, and in the process dumped the up-front option to search only ‘Australian sites’.
Australians are waking to a new-look Google after the search supremo gave the local site a major makeover.
The initial ‘home page’ for
Google.com.au looks the same but the search results page now displays a menu of related search options ranked down the left side of the screen.
Previously tucked away under a ‘Show options’ link at the top of the page they’re now in full view, full time. This is similar to the way that options are already displayed using Google image search, but with large colourful icons labelling the linked buttons plus a collapsing set of ‘search tools’.
If this seems slightly familiar, that’s because it has a bit of the Bing look about it, with Microsoft’s search engine sporting the same always-there search pane, although Bing actually has less of Google’s graphical bling (and displays links for related searches by default).
One of the initial search options lets you toggle between viewing results pulled from the entire Web or just ‘pages from Australia’ – this is the same choice as used to be provided by buttons on Google.com.au before you began your search.
However, the redesign removes it from Google’s ‘home page’ so that users are now searching the entire Web by default.
Only after the first search can users limit its scope to local sites by clicking ‘Pages from Australia’ in the left-side column.
Forcing users to click a second time to filter the current search results, rather than letting them choose up front if the search is to be for international or Australian sites, seems counter-intuitive and arse-about.
A more subtle change has taken place with the Google logo – the colours appear flattened, the glow in each letter is removed and the drop-shadow has been pushed back to barely-there status. The effect is to flatten the logo, and it’s arguable if this makes the iconic logo look
more modern or like a blast from the early days of dot-com past.
Logo smackdown! Old Google above vs new Google below
(You can’t spy the logo on the main Google.com.au page today as today it’s been replaced by a design to celebrate the 170th Birthday of Tchaikovsky, but the streamlined graphics sits above the search options pane in the results page.)
What’s your take on the Google’s new look: like it, loathe it or couldn’t care less about it?