New Google Test: Remove The Top Black Bar

Google is testing yet another user interface test, this one is where the top thin black bar can be removed completely.

Tecno-net spotted this earlier and showed that if you can also remove the top black bar by going to this URL.

Google added the thin Google black bar back in June 2011 and tried another drop down version a few months after but then went back to the thin black bar.

Now you can remove it by adding ?esrch=Agad::Public to the end of the Google URL.

Here are pictures with and without he black bar:

Google also recently started testing a top bar navigation.

Past Google User Interface Tests:

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Google: User Interface | Google: Web Search


About The Author: is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here.

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  • http://qualitypoint.blogspot.com/ Rajamanickam

    How to bring back the Black Bar?

  • http://www.JoeRega.com/ Joseph Rega

    It seems strange that they would remove a shortcut to Google+ (+You) after they’ve been pushing it so hard the past year. 

  • http://twitter.com/targetonlinemkt TargetOnlineMarketin

    Agreed with Joseph but this is what website optimisation, A/B testing is about after all…
    I quite like this navigation bar for quicklinks to YouTube accounts, G+, Google Places, etc
    I vote for keeping it!

  • http://raventools.com Jon Henshaw

    They’re already doing this with Google Drive (aka Docs). It appears to be all about focus. For example, when you go to the main Drive page, you have the bar. However, when you open a new document, the bar disappears. I’m assuming they’re applying the same philosophy to their search results. They know you’re there to search, and therefore the bar is a distraction.

  • Alex Chitu

    Inaccurate. It’s the custom UI for “A Google a Day” (notice “agad” in the URL?)

    http://agoogleaday.com/

  • Damon Hedg

    How can I force it to show on my sites?

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