Google Defends Search Changes

Google Defends Search Changes
Google has defended the introduction of a panel on the left-hand side of its search results page, after it received criticism from surfers. The change, along with slight modifications to the Google logo and colour scheme of the search engine, happened earlier this month.

“A common way to expand the flexibility of a website has been to add a left-hand panel of links, often I referred to by designers as a ‘left-hand nay’,” said Jon Wiley, senior user- experience designer at Google.

But 60 per cent of visitors polled on Webuser.co.uk said that they didn’t like the new design and wanted to return to the old version of Google’s results page. “Why could they not simply make it optional? For example, there could be a very narrow ‘column’ on the left that users could expand to see all the options by clicking on it,” one visitor wrote.