Google is a master of innovation in the search space and while they seem to subscribe to Guy Kawasaki’s “release early and release often” new product philosophy, the attention to changing the Google search page is near-holy. Minuscule design changes at even the pixel level are cautious and carefully considered. And rare.

Apparently, Google is testing a redesign and logo which you can see in this home page screen shot:

New Google Home Page 112609

The logo has changed and the “Google Search” and “I’m Feeling Lucky” buttons are blue rather than gray. But the biggest changes are on the search results page:

New Google Search Results 112609

I’ll mention some of the specific changes but I have to say, my initial (and critical) opinion of the updated search results page is “awesome”. I liked it immediately.

Left column: Colorful blue headings and icons are added for categories of search. The number of initial categories displayed varies by the search query. When I searched on “playstation 3″, Everything, News, Blogs and Shopping showed as the default search categories. You can expand categories to include images, video, books, maps and forums.  What initially displays and the remaining categories to expand varies by the query.

Related search queries are listed below that followed by options for time intervals which are from the Options feature.

Additional search tools can be expanded including even more related searches and a timeline.

Google Timeline

Standard search are displayed as a default, but under expanded search tools options for Page images, Fewer shopping sites, More shopping sites and Page previews are available.

Middle Column. The search results for news, blogs, images, video etc all stay within the same format as standard search, although shopping is unique.  There is a preview page image search option that is pretty handy, allowing you to see a thumbnail of the page.

I did notice related queries suggested at the top of the page on some queries, but not all. Also, on some search results, it shows a link for cached but also for “similar” on some, not all listings.

This was reported on Google Blogscoped Wed where you can get the copy/paste code to check out the redesigned Google yourself. SEL also mentioned it.

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