Google's redesign comes to its tablet

Google -- while known for many things such as search, ads, cloud services and Android -- has never been lauded for its design presence. But over the last couple of months, the Mountain View, Calif., company has gained some style it didn't quite have in the past, with a sleek redesign put in place for many (but not yet all) of its services, including Google.com and the cleanly designed social networking effort Google+. Now Google is bringing its search results on tablets into the fold by adding the same design themes seen elsewhere in the company's new look. The black bar to navigate between different Google services is there, as is the less-cluttered look found on desktop and laptop browsers. Google said on Friday, in announcing the new design for tablet search results, that it has increased the size of text, buttons and "other touch targets to make it faster and easier to browse and interact with search results in portrait or landscape view." The "search button located below the search box provides quick access to specific types of results like Images, Videos, Places, Shopping and more," said Xiaorui Gan, a Google software engineer, in a company blog post. "Just tap to open the search menu and select an option to see results in one category." While using Google search on tablets, laptops or PCs has never been difficult, it is nice that it's getting better-looking and the items a user might wish to tap are getting bigger and thus easier to use. "For image results, we focused on improvements that enhance the viewing experience such as enlarged image previews, continuous scroll and faster loading of image thumbnails," Gan said. The revised tablet search results are hitting both Android and iPad tablets over the next few days. Sound off in the comments to tell us what you think of Google's new look both on tablets and elsewhere.