Google's new favicon is all blue

Google has a new favicon. Unlike its earlier, tiled favicon in red, green, yellow and blue, it is entirely blue.

A favicon or a favourite icon is essentially an icon associated with a website, which helps recognise the site easily. Google had last changed its favicon in 2009, bringing in the colour-tiled version. The design of the favicon had been derived from a design submitted by André Resende, a computer science undergraduate student at the University of Campinas in Brazil.

Users can now see the newest favicon on the Google homepage tab on their browser. The striking change in the favicon is the all-blue appearance. In addition, it seems Google is testing variants of the favicon. One of the variants we spotted was all blue but with the lower-case 'g' placed in the left; another one appeared on the browser as seen in the image below with the 'g' centre-aligned. 

The new favicon as it appears now

Last week, Google rolled out a slew of improvements across its services, Search being one of them. The search giant is constantly up at improving it. In an official blog post, Jeromy Henry, a User Experience Designer at Google announced that the search function on mobiles and tablets had been improved. He affirmed that Google Search has been about delivering answers that users seek, as quickly as possible. Google Search, as we know it today, is used for the most mundane queries such as the weather forecast, solving an equation or other straightforward metric conversions.

Recently we had reported about a study finding that India came second only to the U.S., in terms of education-related search queries. In 2008, India ranked 8^th in this respect. The results of the study were compiled using Google search query patterns, and an offline research by TNS Australia on behalf of Google India. The study was conducted across seven Indian cities: New Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Bangalore. The study found that more than 60 percent of the Indian students with Internet access used the Internet as their primary source for researching information about educational courses and institutes.

Cover image credit: OMG!CHROME!