INeedAttention.com

Although Google traditionally is cautious with changes to its home page, which is often cited as an exemplar of a simple user interface, a new design is being tested quietly to those who are invited to try it. Of course, you don’t have to wait. Simply visit google.com, and paste this into your address bar:

javascript:void(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U=4bf292d46faad806:TM=1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/; domain=.google.com”);

Refresh the page…

Now your home page should change from this:

Google home page screen shot from 2009

To this:

Screenshot of a preview of the Google home page design for 2010

At first view, not much has changed:

• The top link bar uses a lighter blue for links
• The Google logo uses a much more color saturation than previously
• The search box size has increased ever-so-slightly
• The search buttons are now blue with white text
• Links to “Advanced Search” and “Language Tools” are gone
• More space is padded between the footer and the rest of the page
• “Make Google your homepage” has been added to the footer links

But that’s just the beginning, since the search results have changed as well. When searching for “Windows”, your search results would normally look like this:

Screenshot of Google search results for "Windows" without AdBlock Plus

Or, if you were using the Firefox plug-in AdBlock Plus, which we highly recommend, your results would look like this (a clear difference!):

Screenshot of Google search results for "Windows" without AdBlock Plus

AdBlock plus will catch most ads, stopping them before they ever load. So it was quite surprising to see that even with AdBlock Plus enabled using EasyList, the new Google home page looked like this:

Screenshot of redesigned Google search results for "Windows" even with AdBlock Plus

First, what’s new?

• The top link bar again uses a lighter blue for links, the more saturated logo, larger search box text, and the blue button style
• The “Advanced Search” option has moved under the search box, making way for the result count to move next to the search box; this also lines up naturally with the ad column
• The horizontal section containing search result options and the search result count is gone in favor of the side bar search result options; the “definition” link is completely removed
• The new sidebar provides iconographic search result type selection, as well as search suggestions, and search option selectors, all at a glance; this seems to make the top bar irrelevant, although it remains anyway
• The ad label “Sponsored Links” is now slightly smaller

Personally I think it looks just as nice, and perhaps even a bit cleaner, but I am not happy that I was opted back into viewing the ads. It turns out this is because the AdBlock Plus filter list provided by EasyList was using the following rule to filter ads on Google.com:

~all.google.domains##table#mbEnd[width=”30%”]

To block the new ads, try adding your own filters, which are a bit more general than before:

~all.google.domains##div#rhs

~all.google.domains##div#tads

After adding those filters, the page should display like this:

Screenshot of redesigned Google search results for "Windows" after updating AdBlock Plus filters

Unfortunately, the page design keeps the middle column pinned down under small resolutions, which would not be an issue except that AdBlock’s filtering techniques don’t provide a way to manipulate style rules. This is perhaps better suited to Greasemonkey. So, I created a Greasemonkey script to block the top and side ads in the new Google search results. Besides just blocking the top and side ads, the script will update the center column’s style to allow it to fill the screen better in low resolutions (1024 x 768 and under).

Screenshot of redesigned Google search results for "Windows" after adding the ad-blocking Greasemonkey script

Of course, if you block Google search result ads, you’ll miss the ads on this site, which we won’t lose sleep over, but more importantly you’ll miss ads targeted way too broadly creating amusing situations when you search for bizarre things:

Hopefully this is something you cannot actually find on eBay

I hope you found this interesting, helpful, not terribly boring, or any of the above! Got feedback? Please leave it below!