The ‘Air’ design by Chan Karunamuni has won the RedesignGoogle competition.

Air by Chan Karunamuni

Chan wins a MacBook Air which will replace his “trusty 2006 Macbook Pro, becoming my mobile satellite for surfing and designing on the go.”

We created RedesignGoogle so you could personalize the appearance of the Google search results page. The design hasn’t changed for ten years and we wanted to seek out the best ideas for innovation by running this competition.

Chan says: “Google spends a lot of time tweaking their front page when they really should be working on their results page, which has stayed the same for about a decade now. I had a few ideas floating around of what Google might look like in 5 or 10 years, so I decided to attempt to implement them within the constraints the contest provided… it’s a dream project: who wouldn’t want to take a shot at redesigning the most popular digital service in the history of mankind?”

“The goal behind Air was very simple: to reduce as much visual noise in the original design as possible. For example, the menu doesn’t appear until the page thinks you want to make a new search, based on your mouse location. The search button doesn’t clutter the header unless you’re editing a query, and all secondary information in the results is out of your way until you need it.”

Other popular and highly-ranked entries were Go Ogle by randsco, which has a more risque take on the future of search (with the help of Alena Seredova), whereas Plex by Peng Zhong is described as “Google torn apart and completely rebuilt from ground zero.” and came a very close second.

GoOgle by randsco

Plex by Peng Zhong

Thousands of entries were submitted to the RedesignGoogle gallery. A shortlist of 13 was compiled based on users’ votes, comments and number of downloads of each design. Then these were judged by Jason Kincaid (TechCrunch writer), Paul Graham (Y Combinator partner) and Imran Zaidi (WebMynd design lead) to determine the winner.

During the competition, we launched a new feature which allowed the designers to add Javascript (including use of the JQuery library) to their designs so it is no longer just re-skinning Google with CSS, but also adding functionality. The ‘Air’ design takes advantage of this with its Twitter-like paging: click the arrow at the bottom and the next page of results is loaded right there.

WebMynd Sidebar

As well as letting you change the appearance and function of the Google search results page, the WebMynd browser addon (which powered the RedesignGoogle competition) adds search results from the sources you most value in a sidebar to the right-hand side of search results pages.

The future of the RedesignGoogle gallery will be to let designers not only change the appearance and function of search results pages, but also add new results and even change the ordering of existing ones.

You can see our moves in this direction with our own experimental interfaces – first we launched Phoenix:

Phoenix

… and then Manhattan and Osaka. Thousands of our addon users have adopted these interfaces for their day-to-day searching.

We look forward to seeing how people innovate with our new features… watch this space!