Google SERPS With More Padding & Small Logo!
Over the past days or so Google users have been reporting seeing a different design for Google’s search result pages. Upon initially checking into this myself I didn’t see any difference. Then later today I started to get the different Google designed search pages too.
The design has a smaller logo for Google next to the search box at the top of the page. And there seems to be extra padding on the left hand side and right hand side for everything except the navigation links at the very top of the page.
I for one don’t like the new design, I actually liked the older one. My guess is the are changing it either as an A/B testing to see which preforms better or they found some users could not see the text on the very left or right hand side of the screen due to their browser and computer monitor (I’ve had this issue before with older monitors, were you can’t see about 5px of the very left and right hand sides of the screen).
Additionally I’ve noticed a few other changes to Google’s search. They recently rolled out with a search suggest that’s embedded in the search boxes at the top and bottom of your SERPs. I know they had this a while back but they took it away and now seem to have brought it back but with different font styling (font is bold for the text you didn’t type in to help you recognize it).
Although all and all this does not seem to effect rankings directly in the search engine, at least so far from my observations. But I’m sure that the search suggest will have an effect on the types of keywords that are searched for. For example I was searching for an item the other day on Google and then click one of the search suggestions just because I was interested in it. Although I still went back and searched for the original thing I was looking for, this type of thing could deter users from one search and making another instead.
Comments
Will says: Unfortunately, changes are BAD! I sent out message to Google, because I’m very angry on padding. Now it’s very UNCOMFORTABLE to use it! Google must to add option either to use bigger padding or to not! Google dissapointed me again…
It does take a while to get used to this small design changes.
Too many years using the same google search results pages, now it looks strange.
