When the world’s most popular Internet search engine, Google, was launched today, it differed from the competition primarily in the way it searched the web, but also in the look of the homepage. At the time, popular search engines such as Yahoo, MSN, or Altaviste had homepages cluttered with content, and Google stood out with a simple, clean design, with only a logo and a search box – and has remained so to this day, with cosmetic refinements.
Is a major redesign of Google underway?
But these days, some users have noticed that additional tabs appear at the bottom of the screen on their desktop, on the Google.com homepage. Google is obviously testing the change of the most visited website in the world and the biggest change ever.
In this limited test, six smaller windows appeared at the bottom of the screen, based on user preferences, location, and the like. Users who saw this experiment, as reported by 9to5Google, had the following cards in front of them:
- Weather forecast for current location,
- Trending topics, currently the most popular on the search engine,
- Suggestions for watching series and movies,
- Stock market situation,
- Suggestions for upcoming events nearby
- A review of the latest COVID-19 news.
This content can be hidden by clicking on the small switch in the lower right corner of the screen. Clicking on any of the tabs opened a page with more details on the topic that interests the user. As things currently stand, this is a limited range test, and it is not known whether the introduction of this add-on is being considered globally and for all users.
So far, the biggest change on Google.com, and its localized versions, could be the introduction of dark mode, which happened last September.
