Try a Secret New Google

By  |  Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 4:22 pm

Google guru Philipp Lenssen has a cool tip on his Google Blogoscoped site: He shows how to turn on an experimental version of Google by pasting a URL into your browser. It’s got a number of minor visual tweaks, including a much cleaner version of the Google logo (it even skips the TM sign).

But for me, the real treat of the new version is the fact that it turns the Google Search Options left-hand filters on as a standard part of the default search-results view. I’ve been hooked on them since they showed up last May, especially for restricting my results to a specific time frame. And as far as I can tell, there hasn’t even been a way to tell Google that you’d like to leave the Search Results panel open permanently–it’s required a click every time I’ve wanted to use it.

Google’s instinctive desire to keep its pages from getting cluttered up is one of the company’s most admirable traits. But I hope it decides that the Search Results are worth the real estate they occupy–and that this new design becomes the default view real soon now.

 
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6 Comments For This Post

  1. Chris Heath Says:
    November 25th, 2009 at 5:17 pm

    My co-worker somehow got that when he went to his normal homepage the other day (they must have been messing with turning it on or something). I took a look at it and he refreshed and it was gone… back to normal.

    PS: looks like you left out the link to blogoscoped… unless you meant to leave it out.

  2. Daryn St. Pierre Says:
    November 25th, 2009 at 6:04 pm

    Cool article but there’s no link to actually enable these features. That would be helpful to have, unless we’re supposed to go find it ourselves. Also, the links in your page content are extremely hard to distinguish between static page content and actual, clickable links.

  3. Seumas Says:
    November 25th, 2009 at 6:27 pm

    This is Google’s version of ‘Clippy’. *snicker*

    I’ve really grown to appreciate the time constrained search options.

  4. Daryn St. Pierre Says:
    November 25th, 2009 at 6:59 pm

    I like the new features they’ve added. It’s cool that you can now narrow the time scope of the search results. Handy!

    Seumas, what’s Clippy? I’m not familiar with that.

  5. Harry McCracken Says:
    November 25th, 2009 at 7:32 pm

    My apologies–I forgot to include the link. In there now…

    –Harry

  6. Carter Cole Says:
    November 27th, 2009 at 10:09 am

    i have my own ideas about what this search is for http://j.mp/7AfVPr and im assuming its some a/b testing google is doing for the new layout

3 Trackbacks For This Post

  1. Another Secret New Google Says:
    March 1st, 2010 at 6:10 pm

    […] all: News Last November, I wrote about a test version of Google that left its search options sidebar open all the time. It never graduated to full public status. But I just stumbled upon what seems to be a variant. […]

  2. Another Secret New Google | Tech News, Reviews, Business, Health News and More Says:
    March 19th, 2010 at 6:27 am

    […] November, I wrote about a test version of Google that left its search options sidebar open all the time. It never graduated to full public status. But I just stumbled upon what seems to be a variant. […]

  3. Google’s New Design Gets Official Says:
    May 5th, 2010 at 8:34 am

    […] a left-hand sidebar today and tomorrow. It’s the final version of a design it’s been experimenting with for a long time, and bears a general conceptual resemblance to the sidebar at Bing, although the execution is quite […]