Things change quickly on the internet and apparently nothing is sacred. The Telegraph noticed Monday that Google is testing black search result links instead of the traditional blue. Not surprisingly, internet denizens have … thoughts.
That’s right, there’s already a hashtag, #bringbacktheblue, and active discussion on Google’s forums about how people experiencing the black links can switch back to blue. Google is known for design obsession, so the link color experiment isn’t very surprising. Neither is the company’s coy statement given to Engadget and other outlets: “We’re always running many small-scale experiments with the design of the results page. We’re not quite sure that black is the new blue.”
Google is presumably tracking how the color change affects user interaction with search results, especially click-through rates. If black links subtly motivate people to click on more results, they could ultimately earn Google more money in ad revenue.
Of course, Google is far from the only site to use blue for links. Hyperlinks have been blue since the early days of the internet. A popular theory says that web founding father Sir Tim Berners-Lee chose this color because it was the darkest option at the time aside from black, and he wanted links to stand out from all the gray backgrounds and black text in early browsers.* Lance Ulanoff notes on Mashable, however, that an old FAQ Berners-Lee did on the World Wide Web Consortium’s site doesn’t totally agree with this account.
There is no reason why one should use color, or blue, to signify links: it is just a default. I think the first WWW client (WorldWideWeb I wrote for the NeXT) used just underline to represent link, as it was a spare emphasis form which isn’t used much in real documents. Blue came in as browsers went color—I don’t remember which was the first to use blue. …
My guess is that blue is the darkest color and so threatens the legibility least. I used green whenever I could in the early WWW design, for nature and because it is supposed to be relaxing. Robert Cailliau made the WWW icon in many colors but chose green as he had always seen W in his head as green.
Even if Google eventually forsakes blue, it won’t necessarily go with black. Maybe instead it will go with green—saluting both nature and money.
Update, May 10, 2016: In this sentence, the word ”internet” has been changed to ”web” to clarify that Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s contribution to the development of the modern internet was creation of the World Wide Web.
