Quick Look (with Screenshots) at Google's New Search Interface

While we generally don't go too far into the realm of software, Internet technologies, operating systems and so on (simply because that's the field of expertise of our colleagues from Softpedia Webscripts and Softpedia News), there are certain situations when we feel compelled to share with you certain interesting things we come across in our daily activities, most of which (OK, almost all of which) are carried out with the help of the Internet in general and the Google search engine in particular.

So, I'm pretty sure that most of you out there are using Google quite often, and it might be the case that some of you have also been granted access to the new search interface, which, as far as we're concerned, represents quite an important step forward in terms of visual effect.

There are quite a few methods for artificially providing access to this new visual UI, but we tried some of them before and they didn't really worked. However, much to my surprise, a couple of days ago, when carrying out some random search, I was offered access to this fresh interface and have been using it ever since.

So, the main difference between the previous and current UI can be noticed on the left side of the page, where users will be provided with a comprehensive set of search tools. In fact, they're not that different from the ones available on the top side, but they're simply more... visual, more easily and readily accessible (or at least that was my feeling on the subject). For example, narrowing the search to a certain time frame can now be carried out quite easily, and the same can be said about other search options.

Notably, image search has been seriously boosted, users being able to even choose what colors they're looking for in picture, not to mention the size of the respective photo or the type (Face, Photo, Line Drawing, etc.). Video search options are also very interesting, prompting users to narrow the search based on the length of the video they're searching for, its relevance, the quality, the service hosting the video, etc.

News search has also been upgraded, posting time and relevance having an enhanced role in finding the desired piece of information. The rest of the search options have also been upgraded, but we won't go into further details for the time being, given the fact that the ones we've listed above are typically the most popular.

Last, but not least, I'll have to mention that one of the coolest search options accessible via the new UI is the possibility of displaying page previews alongside the search results, timeline and related searches, etc.

All I can hope now is that you'll be able to test this new UI as soon as possible for yourselves, but I guess this is up to Google, at least for the time being.