Remember the tests Google has been running on their homepage lately? Well, now they’re officially rolling out the new version.

What they’ve decided to go with is the fade-in version. When you get access to the updated homepage (which is rolling out over a few days), you’ll just see the Google logo, the search box, and the submit buttons.

Then, when you move your mouse, the rest of the page will fade in.

So why the change? Google’s Marissa Mayer, who tightly controls the look of the Google homepage, took to the <a href="“>Official Google blog to explain:

…the variant of the homepage we are launching today was positive or neutral on all key metrics, except one: time to first action. At first, this worried us a bit: Google is all about getting you where you are going faster — how could we launch something that potentially slowed users down? Then, we realized: we want users to notice this change… and it does take time to notice something (though in this case, only milliseconds!). Our goal then became to understand whether or not over time the users began to use the homepage even more efficiently than the control group and, sure enough, that was the trend we observed.

Lately, Google is experimenting more than Sheldon Cooper on their homepage – and now, also on their search results.

They’re testing a permanent left sidebar in their search results, which would turn the results into three columns: new sidebar, organic results, search ads. Hmm, this reminds us of Bing. And Bing reminded us of Ask’s 3D design (which they’ve since abandoned).

Additionally, after experimenting with removing the submit buttons on the homepage, now Google is bringing back the buttons and testing them with a new color: bright, primary blue.

In the Google help forums, two screenshots of these experiments were posted:

New Sidebar

Blue Buttons on Homepage

via Google Blogoscoped