Google is making some design changes to its overwhelmingly popular search engine today. The main noticeable changes will be the slightly changed logo, and the new left sidebar on the search results page. Google seems to focus in this new redesign mainly on extreme simplicity, which has always clearly been very close to Google's heart. Hearing of a redesign, I thought to myself, is there finally going to be some elegance to Google? Like Bing? The answer is no. In fact, it's quite the opposite, though I do appreciate the left sidebar. Pics and videos below.

First off is Google's new logo. To make matters even more simple, they've removed most of the gradients in the logo and the shadow as well. There's no trademark logo either anymore. It actually has a very playful, plastic sort of feel to it.

The buttons also have a slight tweak to them, and you'll notice the Advanced Search, Language Tools, and bottom navigation of the home page have a lighter color, making it less prominent on the page. The new logo will eventually replace Google logos everywhere.

As for the new sidebar, it's a nice edition. At the top shows you all the different categories of search you can perform starting with "Everything" followed by other categories. What's nice is those categories underneath change according to your search. If you search for an item or gift, you're more likely to see Maps or Shopping there whereas if you search Times Square, as of now, you'll see News as the next category.



Under that are options to narrow your search results and fine tune them by relevance, date, time, and many others.

Personally, I still like Bing better. I really like the whole design of it and ease of use for many options (however image search lacks filters compared to Google), but these new changes at Google do drop hints for Bing to step up its game a little bit. You can watch Google's brief tutorial below on the new search, which oddly looks like a "Mac vs. PC" commercial at the beginning.




Images Courtesy: Mashable