Andrew Chen

Happy holidays everyone! I just wanted to make a brief return from a blogging vacation to show you a new Google search test where I’ve been randomly been assigned to the A/B test.

To summarize the main differences:

• Big blue buttons for everything
• Drill-down sidebar after a search
• Emphasis on filtering by time – so you can get the “latest”
• Search across their properties, including News, Blogs, Books, Forums, Shopping, etc.
• Features I haven’t seen (except in labs?) such as Timeline, Related Searches, Wonder wheel, etc.

Really a ton of changes!

Here are the photos: First, the homepage…

And here’s a search results page after an egosurf:

Here’s the expanded sidebar:

There are lots of changes, you can check out all the screencaps below:

UPDATE: Interesting – I’m noticing that the sidebar is switching between all text vs icons + large text, on a page-by-page basis. Plus they are changing the content around by quite a bit. Seems like they are still testing the exact nature of the sidebar.

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