How Google’s Designers Are Quietly Overhauling Search

Google’s product teams are built to be nimble and quick, but creating a unified design vision requires a top-down push. Google CEO Larry Page provided that push. And while the design of Google Search in 2000 looked almost the same as it did in 2010, the service--along with Maps, Gmail, and Calendar--got the biggest redesign of its history in 2011. After that, Search kept evolving.

New “knowledge graph” results popped up as photos and Wikipedia-like factoids to the right of results. Answers weren’t always presented as links. Putting a math problem in the search box, for instance, now returns a calculator. The search-options bar has migrated from its traditional post on the left-hand side of the search-results page to the top. Your average user may not have noticed anything different, but in the context of Google Search’s history, this is radical stuff. Google’s recently uncaged designers are looking at search differently.