The biggest change in their redesign has nothing to do with the new logo, redundancy in navigation (because that can't be an issue) or making the different search tools more discoverable.
The biggest change is the top left position of the first search result relative to the top left position of the document. In other words, the average scanning pattern has completely changed with the addition of a fixed side bar.
It will take a lot of people a long time to adjust and its effectiveness can't be judged by a couple of hours of usage. It's not unlikely to assume Google is very willing to take a slight hit in this area and win in the discoverability of their different ways to use Google, hopefully, eventually improving a person's overal searching efficiency.
Time will tell, but we all know Google tests these things through and through.
I'd argue it's a change for the better. While the first search result has changed its position relative to the document, it has now lined up with the input of the search box at the top of the page. In the old version it did not. I would think that users eyes' are drawn to the search box, and this new format aids scanning.
Also, as monitor sizes have gone up (and this might just be a personal preference) I've found that I'd rather the important stuff be in the middle of the screen, not over on the left. Is that just me?
> It's not unlikely to assume Google is very willing to take a slight hit in this area
What hit are you talking about? Are people willing to leave Google to use another search engine and get used to their UI?. Unless they royally screw up with the design (which they didn't IMO) they have almost nothing to lose.
If you compare this with bing, you will see that they have a lot of similarities.
A hit in efficiency of the user when scanning the search results.
And you're right. People won't leave Google over this. But Google has done extensive testing on page speed in the past and measured its long term impact on pageviews per search. I'd argue that a change in scanning patterns like this one affects the perception of speed of the interface and might impact the aforementioned metric.
Overall, it should be a change for the better and i'm sure that Google wants to increase the efficiency per search to increase the overal number of unique searches a user might do -- while caring a bit less about the number of pageviews per search.
As for Bing, in interface design for a company like Google --a company that effectively dominates the market and sees marginal loss of users-- the competition is irrelevant. Especially for simple UI changes such as this one.
When doing a change such as this one Google is its own competitor. It needs to find a way to transition their user's habits to what they believe is a more usable one. This is by far always the hardest part and really what we are discussing right now :-)
It's awesome to see though. I'd imagine it's incredbily hard to convince a board of such changes, especially in an engineering minded company such as Google.
The biggest change is the top left position of the first search result relative to the top left position of the document. In other words, the average scanning pattern has completely changed with the addition of a fixed side bar.
It will take a lot of people a long time to adjust and its effectiveness can't be judged by a couple of hours of usage. It's not unlikely to assume Google is very willing to take a slight hit in this area and win in the discoverability of their different ways to use Google, hopefully, eventually improving a person's overal searching efficiency.
Time will tell, but we all know Google tests these things through and through.