Google Home page

You may have noticed that Google homepage is sporting a new look. Today they are excited to be releasing a new version of our classic homepage. The main feature of the new homepage is that it “fades in” — when the page first loads, it shows only our logo, the search box and the buttons.

For those users who are interested in using a different application like Gmail, Google Image Search or our advertising programs, the additional links on the homepage only reveal themselves when the user moves the mouse. For the past few months, they have been experimenting with homepage designs like this and have run several live tests on the site.

Some of the experiments hindered the user experience: for example, the variants of the homepage that hid the search buttons until after the fade performed the worst in terms of user happiness metrics.

Other variants of the experiment produced humorous outcomes when combined with our doodles — the barcode doodle combined with the fade was particularly ironic in its overstated minimalism. However, in the end, the variant of the homepage we are launching today was positive or neutral on all key metrics, except one: time to first action.

Then, we realized: we want users to notice this change… and it does take time to notice something (though in this case, only milliseconds!). Internally, a large number of Google employees have been using the new homepage. They have come to really like it — it represents our focus on great search yet helps searchers efficiently access all of Google’s products.