It has been on the cards for a while but Google have now put their fading homepage live. When users visit the Google homepage they are now greeted with a noticeable minimalist design and users can only see the links that normally adorn the page once they move their mouse.

When Google was first testing the homepage it lead many to questions about why the change was necessary, especially as it slows down the process of users getting to where they want which goes against Google’s ethos. Also due to the almost pointlessness of the change it also lead people to question whether it was in fact a hoax.

Apparently from reading around the change to the homepage highlights accentuates the links on the homepage more effectively where people had began to almost ignore the links under the pervious homepage design. This would appear to be the case as a statement on Search Engine Land from Google states that they “want users to notice this change” and that their goal “became to understand whether or not over time the users began to use the homepage even more efficiently than the control group and, sure enough, that was the trend we observed.…”

I’m still not overly convinced by the new design however it is essentially only minor change and let’s face it doesn’t really have much of an effective on the way we search. However it still feels weird arriving on the homepage at the moment and so it’s going to be a case of getting used to it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 at 4:47 pm and is filed under Google, Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.