Great post. As for the ease of use and whether users will love it, it turns out I was using the new UI in the wee hours this morning to research a hot topic with a lot of old but high-ranking pages — and I didn’t really realize it was different. OK, so I was a bit tired. I thought, “last week, last month … hmmm, that’s handy.” It really helped me cut through the crap.

Then again, just now I was trying to answer the simple question “can Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 create fillable, savable forms?” Standard Google search is chock full of offical Adobe pages (steering you to their Enterprise solutions), and a lot of duplicate information. But clicking on the handy Blogs link gave me my answer in seconds. (Yes: Go to Advanced > Extend Features in Adobe Reader ;-))

I may work for clients who want to make sure they’re well-represented online. But just like everyone else, sometimes I just want a piece of information — the exact right piece of information — now. Anything that helps get me there, I Like.

The Nearby search option defaults to the location that I believe Google recognizes from your IP address. Even changing the location makes no difference to the results. It sometimes makes a slight difference to the Organic results but the PPC results remain the same.

AOL.com had a three column interface for web search in 2005/2006 too. They offered functions and search history on left side too. I posted a screen from April 2005 in my blog, so you could see their interface (http://tinyurl.com/37d36d3). I hope it is ok that I’m referring to my blog. It’s just around search themes with focus on usability. But I can not attache this screen to this post…

AOL.com roll back this functions and go back to the two column interface. They had a bigger chance in their search strategy in 2007. From this date the search looks similar to Google search.

Yahoo. com does it in web search too. But they are using other functions as Google.

I’m really noise which concept will survive and how Google, bing and Yahoo develop their search interfaces.

What I didn’t see addressed, probably because it doesn’t apply to the Google.com version, is a change that I noticed when Google was testing this in early April – which Kalena Jordan then blogged about on the Site Pro News website:
http://www.sitepronews.com/2010/04/02/google-rolling-out-new-serp-design/

On the new Google.com.au homepage, the tick boxes for Search “the web” or “pages from Australia” had completely disappeared in the new user interface. I found this very annoying because as a searcher in Australia, I often only want to see Australian search results and tend to tick the second box regularly.

I note this applies to other country versions of Google as well, e.g. google.co.uk etc.

I’m very curious to find out whether Google has implemented this in its final design and taken away our ability to search only for pages from our country right from the Google homepage. On search results pages, the options were also tucked away in the options on the left rather than right underneath the search box, where they are now.

I can’t see that any of Google’s country homepages are live yet with the new design, so do you know whether this is indeed another major change in the new design that Google has implemented?

I don’t think Google always gets the UI right, but this time? A vast improvement. I hope it sticks.