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I think this guess from /r/typography/ is worthy to consider:

"My educated guess is that it most likely scales in Webkit better. I can only imagine this change was the result of a dozen round table discussions and half a year of a/b testing. EDIT: Yup! Here's both logos at 50%, scaling done by Chrome. Notice how the letter l changes [1]

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/x6K1yVe.png "

http://www.reddit.com/r/typography/comments/26fgq6/google_up...

It's not a bad theory, but then again the `G` doesn't visually change, the `l` looks better horizontally, but worse vertically. Seems like a tie, at least at this resolution.
Assume google.com serves 300 trillion impressions a year and clicking an ad generates $0.20 in revenue.

The new logo would need to improve CTRs by 0.0000017% to generate a million dollars per year in new revenue.

> I can only imagine this change was the result of a dozen round table discussions and half a year of a/b testing

I really hope not...

A company is making too much money if they can waste half a year in discussing and testing something like this.
More likely they've been working on the scaling algorithm in Chrome, and the logo just happened to look bad (or shall we say less than optimal).
Not really. It takes very few resources to run an A/B test for six months. Set it up, check back for results six months later.

Not that they necessarily did that here, but still.

This change totally sucks and, to me, it represents everything that's happened at Google that I don't like. Which is everything. Because I hate it when stuff changes.
I know! I can't even find the g and l anymore unless I move my eyes slightly down and to the left, how is this intuitive??
I made a gif for easy comparison: http://i.imgur.com/ltqwgvL.gif
The descriptions are wrong, the letters were moved right not left. Anyways, the new one is more balanced. Quite the zen garden.
I found this through /r/mildlyinteresting, and it just made me thing why exactly I find that subreddit, and these kinds of things, so interesting. Perhaps it's that it makes you think about mundane things that you normally don't give a second thought, or even notice?
Clearly this is the start of a boil-the-frog campaign that will see the "l" drop out of the logo completely as the "g" slides over to take its place. It'll happen so gradually over the course of the next eight months that most users won't even notice.
Obviously the 1-pixel moves signify the shift in Google’s business strategy. Google is now politicaly one more pixel to the left and moving towards the lower upper class by one pixel.

#OverAnalyzing

You'd make a fantastic English teacher.
“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”
Obviously a response to the DDG redesign.
Who noticed, how and why?
I imagine the updated url was noticed. Decrement the last number in the url to see older images, e.g. https://www.google.com/images/srpr/logo1w.png
Resisting the temptation to ask who is thing being upvoted, I'll ask a sibling question: Why are people upvoting this? Does this help someone in a meaningful fashion and in a way that worthy of bringing to everyone's attention?
This sounds like something out of the onion. I think this is how you become irrelevant. Didn't yahoo do something similar?
Life is just parody of itself these days.

Edit: And yes, Yahoo did something similar:

It turns out Mayer herself played a pivotal role, working with Yahoo's design team (and an intern) to design the new logo over the course of a single weekend. "I’m not a pro, but I know enough to be dangerous," Mayer says of her Adobe Illustrator know-how. "We knew we wanted a logo that reflected Yahoo — whimsical, yet sophisticated," she writes. "Modern and fresh, with a nod to our history."

http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/5/4696274/yahoo-reveals-its-n...

I like the old logo better.
I don't know what is it, but this new one just feels wrong. I hope they change their mind before it's too late.
Who cares?
Clearly someone at Google does:)

In fact, I almost guarantee this change had multiple people involved, and probably at least several internal discussions.

Source: Used to work on the team responsible for the webserver that serves the Google homepage.

> In fact, I almost guarantee this change had multiple people involved, and probably at least several internal discussions.

You just described Hell to me.

LOL
Fixed.
lol theyre new desing ppl are idots, Gogle is doomed

etc. etc.

What is wrong with you HN visitors that this is on the FP?
Let me guess, a new OCD-suffering designer has joined the team? :)
Arrgh! This is the third time I've run into this "story" in the last 24 hours - let it go, internet!
Someone got paid far above minimum wage to do this. I am not saying it is not deserved just that some people move graphics a pixel a month and tank $300K starting. Others work their asses off physically and maybe make 1/10th of that at their peek.
To be fair, I doubt whoever did this has "pixel adjuster" as their primary job description. Although maybe for some reason it's a highly complex and non-trivial affair at Google.
Some people are paid very well to correct typos, or move text and pictures on a page. You can say it's a bullshit job, or recognize it's a different matter when you're working day in day out on newspapers printing at lots of thousands a day for instance.