There’s a lot of Buzz happening recently with Google doing all sorts of tests with their properties, viz. the implementation of the +1 Button, nav bar, homepage and SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
+1 Button

I love the +1 Button and have been frantically +1-ing everything noteworthy. In SERPs, they’ve been trialing the display of +1 data like which one of your mates has also +1′d it, how many people have +1′d it and the guys at Search Engine Land are talking about Google now localising +1 data “XXX people in NYC have +1′d this”. More and more sites are adding this button to their site and I’d suggest you get onto it too! It’s showing a lot of promise in light of the established and popular Facebook Like button and Twitter Tweet Button. I consider this a form of redemption from Google after the ‘failure’ that was Google Buzz (which I still kinda use actually!)
Nav Bar

A while ago, Google moved their nav bar to the top of the screen and in more recent times, changed the styling of it which was generally met with positive feedback for being clean, clear and simple.

Enter the black nav bar with white text and a red line above the relevant section you are in. Very un-Google like and something considered a bit random from a company that is known for making highly calculated decisions on simple things like whether borders should be 3px, 4px or 5px wide (with full justification) or which shade of blue would be best, out of a possible 41 combinations. No joke.

New Google Homepage

So apart from the black navbar, there’s been some changes to the Google homepage. Interestingly, it only worked for me in Opera and not in Chrome, Firefox or Safari. Here’s a screenshot:

A few things to note:

- logo seems a bit smaller
- more white/negative space above the logo
- black nav bar
- links that once appeared under the search buttons now appear in the footer, to the left
- buttons look a bit different

Here’s the version in Chrome:

All looks normal apart from the black nav bar.

Notice I’m not signed into Google whilst in either browser and I have cleared my cache too.

Interesting.

New SERPs layout

There was talk of Google testing new SERPs layouts not too long ago, in particular with the styling of the icons in the sidebar. Once again, I’m seeing the change in Opera but not in Chrome. Here’s some screenshots:

A few things to note:

- Results are now left-aligned as opposed to being in the centre of the screen.
- The icons are greyscale, simpler and slightly different to their former selves.
- It highlights the section you’re on by making the text Red.
- The side bar options are all greay apart from options.
- the URL for a listing is now UNDER the page title (used to be under the meta description before)
- grey shading up the top
- search button is no longer grey button with ‘search’ label, but now a blue button with a magnifying glass
- no more ‘similar’ link, just ‘cached’.

I quite like the new layout and almost missed a few changes (viz. location of URL in SERP listing) but I wonder how the rest of Google’s millions of stakeholders will react.

Thoughts?