Google is constantly changing up the structure and format of the massive search engine, but recently, from Friday to Saturday, they tested switching the color from the search results from blue to black.
The “reason” was that black is a color that is easy to notice but many users of the famous search engine disagreed with the change.
41 shades of blue
Google’s decision to change from blue to black comes from 2009 when they tested over 41 shades of blue until they determined that the actual one used caused the most clicks on the search results. It led to bosses opting for a “slightly purpler” color, which is said to have resulted in Google making an extra $200 million approximately in ads revenue.
As everyone that uses Google know, when typing something on the search bar, about 10 links can be found on the first page, where the results are in blue and the URL under the result is green. When users found out that the blue-green combination changed to black-green they weren’t “pleased” at all with that change and many of them expressed their opinions on Twitter, Reddit, and at Google’s Forum.
Google saw my blue links and they've painted them all black,
No colours any more, they want them to turn black! pic.twitter.com/NItnW8NF05— Mark Summerfield (@patentology) May 9, 2016
@google Google! The black unclicked links look terrible and are not very functional! #BringBackTheBlue pic.twitter.com/mkKsrar3B3
— Joseph Madden (@Hyper200) May 9, 2016
Also, back in 2014, Dan Cobley, who is Google UK’s managing director said that they saw which shades of blue people liked the most, demonstrating how much they clicked on them.
“As a result we learned that a slightly purpler shade of blue was more conducive to clicking than a slightly greener shade of blue, and gee whizz, we made a decision,” said Cobley.
Actually, Google serves over a trillion search results per year worldwide, so at the minimum change on the view could make that more people – or less – use Google as their first choice for searching on the web. The only way that allows Google to make the change is that users accept it and find it more “attractive”, but hence, it wasn’t the case it will remain with the classic blue.
Source: Telegraph UK