A possible redesign for Google's search result pages was spotted by PCMag's David Pierce Saturday when a search turned up interestingly tweaked pages that were apparently live for an unspecified period of time.
Pierce captured screenshots of his search for "pcmag" across Google's Web, News, and Shopping search platforms Saturday morning. It wasn't clear if the new-look results pages are finalized versions that are part of Google's plan to roll out its new Instant Pages, Voice Search, and Search by Image additions in the next few weeks, but a new Voice Search microphone icon that appears on the right side of the search box itself in each screen shot is certainly a clue that they could be.
The screenshots show some other small tweaks to search results pages as they appear on Google at the moment. Links to websites have been moved from below a block of intro copy on each ranked result to directly beneath each search result heading, for example.
Also of note is a complete design reworking of the left-hand button icon for switching to an "Everything" Web search, from a stylized "G" icon to a magnifying glass. The other icons indicating Images, Videos, etc. are the same, but they've gone from full color to grayscale. Rather than highlighting a blue, boxy backdrop behind the appropriate icon and label for the search platform a searcher is using, e.g. Shopping, the new design simply turns the icon and label from grey to a brick red.
The search box's own search button is blue in the redesign, with the magnifying glass icon replacing the word "Search." The new-look results page appears to have a colored background for the horizontal bar compromising the Google logo and search box, instead of the basic white backdrop Google has used for years.
On Web searches, the new page layout apparently adds a link to people who've "shared" a given search result, possibly Facebook friends. Meanwhile, the link to Cached pages for individual results is staying, but the one for Similar pages may have bitten the dust.
Google's new search features that should be appearing in the next few weeks include voice and search by image for the desktop, and Instant Pages, which loads Web pages selected by searchers virtually instantly.
The new Instant Pages technology takes the ball from Auto-Correct and Google Instant, two already existing Google technologies, on the query and results side of things and carries it over the finish line—to the searcher's final destination, a fully loaded Web page that's been rendered before the searcher can even click on it.
Google Voice Search is also coming to desktops and notebooks, meaning the little microphone icon seen in the screenshots' Google search boxes will start appearing permanently, allowing searchers to simply state their queries rather than type them in.
Google's new Search by Image for the PC is a cousin of Google Goggles, which lets smartphone users snap a picture of, say, a menu in Cyrillic and have it translated into English.
Search by Image lets users take actual images, drag them into the search box (soon to have a camera icon indicating Search by Image is on) and match them up to what looks to be pretty accurate associated search results. Thus, a snapshot of a Greek island would draw up results identifying the island by name.
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