Running a simple search this morning for “webmaster tools” to see if there is any mention of Yahoo’s Site Explorer in the results yet (there isn’t by the way) and I noticed a few changes on the search results page. For starters the black top navigation bar has appeared for me. I have been hearing talks (more talks, and more, and some more) about Google testing it’s new black menu – but this was the first time I had actually experienced it.
Next you’ll notice the new +1 text which has now been localized – showing me that 152 people in New York have +1’d Google’s Webmaster Tools. Running a few more localized searches however has not shown me this for anything where it would be beneficial to me, as of yet anyway, like breakfast midtown nyc for example showing me that 200 people have +1’d Sunberry’s Cafe – or something along those lines anyway. I guess once the +1 project has some time to really kick off – and maybe if the 7% of Internet Users who still use IE7 upgrade to something that Google +1 actually works with.
As for the black top menu – well I like it. I use the majority of the Google tools – Gmail, Docs, Maps, Calendar – and often have the need to run both image and web based searches on the same topic. The previous version menu bar made the links fade into the background and they were much less noticeable on a search results page with 50 other links that look exactly like it. This said – Google has not made the change to the black menu bar within Gmail, Docs, Finance, Scholar, Calendar or Reader — however it’s there for Web, Images, Video, News, Shopping, Blogs, Realtime, and Books.
UPDATE: Chris Wiggins made a post on the Google Blog announcing the new design.