Probably the most bizarre thing to happen to me recently was this, a mind-blogging re-design of Google which popped up on Google.com (not country-level domains) only on Firefox, only on my computer (within a classroom network) and for only 5 minutes, just enough to show puzzled friends. Unfortunately by the time I though about taking a screen-shot of the search results, which is quite the shocking experience, it had already been took off.
You can actually see more of this on related blogs like this one: http://www.toprankblog.com/2009/11/all-new-google-com/, which for some weird reason refers to the horrible design that weirdly makes Windows XP look like the future Chrome OS as “awesome”.
Actually, after doing some more research, I discovered you can enable the new design with a cookie. Last time Google did this (with the fading menu), they eventually forced seemingly random users and most likely Gmail users who beta things like me to use it and eventually made it a Google-wide feature. Looks like this new design is going to be very real, whether you like it or not. Hit the link for the JavaScript code to make it live.
In any cases, I’m really starting to wonder where the engineers have gone at Google. They used to decide colors based on white-box testing techniques and efficiency; the two latest “innovations”, the fade bar and the new design, really look like newbie mistakes a designer would make so that Google looks “cool”.
