Article appeared on telegraph.co.uk
Google didn’t invent search, but the company has made it our prism for the internet. We don’t go to specific pages because instead we look for information. That means that any tweaking with the magic Google formula is always going to be significant, and the company has now begun the roll-out of some of the most significant changes in several years.
There is, however, nothing much to frighten the horses: the company has tidied up its logo slightly, but the homepage that will confront millions of users will barely look any different. When it comes to results pages, however, there will be real changes. Rather than a crisp list of pages related to a user’s query ranged against the left-hand side of the screen, now a new bar has appeared. At first glance it appears to simply offer some simple options to limit which search results are visible – so if you search for “string theory”, it will offer “images”, “news”, “video” and more. But search, say, for shoes, and you’ll find that “shopping” appears as an option, as does the opportunity to limit results by colour.
