Google's Redesign

As many of you would have noticed by now, Google had a significant makeover yesterday. From trivial elements like removing shadowing effects on the logo to larger changes like a left frame in the search results page, there are a quite a few differences of note. As someone interested in design paradigms for business, I was definitely curious to know the real reasons behind these changes.The official list of changes and rationale is provided by Marissa Mayer, VP at Google for Search and User Experience here.BusinessWeek has a brief video interview of a bunch of people who were involved in the design process here. In this interview, one of the Google UI Designers claims that this change is a platform for future features which is a very interesting.There is also some internet chatter about how Bing could have influenced the left frame creation in the search results. I am not sure how true this is but is definitely worth reading the arguments  here and here. If it were to be true, no harm done as the key to innovative and good products is competition. If Bing could have inspired a Google search result design change, that is great for the use.Here is a non-Google view of why this redesign happened.Finally, if you are really interested in design paradigms for a search interface, here is a wonderful article from a blog I have come to admire very much. It is a lengthy read but very cool.