As reported yesterday, Google.com is preparing a website “redesign”, if you would call it that. What’s in store is more of a sidebar addition. The familiar search page will soon be featuring a sidebar on the left linking to each of Google services (images, froogle, etc.).

My friend David and I saw this redesign back on January 1st, when we were doing some Google searching on his computer. As soon as the search page loaded I knew something wasn’t right. He had a sidebar on the left of his search results. We initially though it was do to his huge 23″ monitor and his 1280×1024 screen resolution, but attempting to get the sidebar to display on other computers failed. We have since then learned that David was just one of those lucky Googlers to get a beta testing cookie. Unfortunately he has lost the beta search page, since he has recently reformatted his computer.

I have mixed feeling about this redesign. I agree Google needs to do some minor tweaks to their search results, but I don’t think a sidebar is the answer. The beta page I initially saw over at David’s was much cleaner then the current revision. It didn’t feature the green relevancy bars and had a little more padding around the search results. I would probably adjust if that would become the new search result page, but the currently redesign just sucks. It feels way too cluttered.

If I was in charge of the Google redesign I would be adding a tab effect to the search results instead of just moving the search options to another area. Reducing the space on the top section of the search would probably be another minor change I would do. Beyond that, I’m pretty satisfied with the current design. As the saying goes, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.