We commenced our latest update of this week to search, and I wanted to share a bit of our considration on the design

team. In short, we tried to take all the things as it we want to provide ,we strive for at Google and make them better:

simplicity,powerful technology, pertinent results,  and a fun and quirky personality. Our goal was to take a design

known by millions of people and make it better. As a designer, it’s a difficult task to think of a more exciting challenge.

Here  we concentrated on people’s rising expectations for search ,during our process. As the web has evolved over the

last decade, people have been trying to type more sophisticated searches and seeking out specialized search tools to

match. To keep pace with rapid change online, we have teams of engineers working across Google to develop new ways

to present and refine search results. Our central challenge with our latest redesign was to figure out how to squeeze all

these tools and technologies into a single page.

A common way to expand the flexibility of a website has been to add a left-hand panel of links, often referred to by

designers as a “left-hand nav.” We’ve been creating mocks of left-hand panels since the earliest days of Google and

have tested these designs with users as far back as 2006. Overall, we’ve found they can provide a great way to navigate

without getting in the way of the main content, but they can also be distracting. Our users want more powerful tools,

but they also want the simplicity they’ve come to expect from Google.

As a first step towards finding that balance, we introduced the Search Options panel last May, including a toggle to

open and close. This way we could quickly try out new search tools, such as refinements by time and content types.

Using the lessons from Search Options, designers, researchers and engineers worked side-by-side to explore a vast array

of possibilities for a permanently open panel of search tools. We made hundreds of prototypes and gathered feedback

from user studies, Googlers and through experiments — including one of our largest visible experiments ever. In the

end, we came up with a design that provides dynamic, relevant search tools on the left, while lightening and updating

the aesthetics all around. Here’s a picture of the Search Options panel (left) and our new results page (right):