Google Homepage Gets New Look

Kausar    Google     google gets new look, google home page, google new look, google search engine look, Google's New Look

Just performing a routine Google search tonight and something seemed off as I looked through the results. The whole page seemed… brighter. It was different in other ways as well. A while ago (September 09) I read that Google was changing their site to make things a little bit bigger. I never really paid much attention to that and now a bigger, more noticeable change comes without any announcement? They even have their own time-line but it doesn’t contain this tidbit. Well, I’ll be your announcement then.
Home page

Here’s the old Google home page:

Here’s the new Google home page:

The changes: The logo is brighter, the letters have lost their shadows, the buttons are bigger, the text box is bigger, and there are fewer distracting links.
Results

Here’s the old Google Search results page:

Here’s the new Google Search results page:

The changes: Same logo changes, the options are now iconified on the left hand side, and the search is location-aware. You now have finer control on filtering results to show Everything, News, Images, Videos, Maps, Shopping, Books, Blogs, Updates (FriendFeed, Twitter, Buzz), or Discussions.

Here’s a closer look of the sidebar expanded:

The particularly interesting thing is that I’m not quite sure how Google is rolling out this change. For me, the new look only shows up in Firefox. Google Chrome still looks like the previous style while IE and Opera look particularly dated with their full grey buttons.

I like the new look and the changes, but I’m surprised Google (as far as I know) has been quiet about it. I wonder where else we’ll see this change take effect. Is anybody else seeing the change implemented? Let me know in the comments.