Google testing colored Star Ratings in Local and Search results

We are all very familiar with the orange color star ratings, which come up with the Google search results. Not only that we have formed many an opinion based on the ratings, with full five bright orange stars meaning very good. It seems Google has started believing in ‘change being the only constant’ idea. In the recent times we have seen several changes brought about by Google, latest being the star colours. Along with Yahoo, we find that Google is also trying out with different colours.

It has been reported that Google is testing out different colors for their star review and the local search results. Why they needed to this was not clear though, as the regular orange was quite ok. They are trying out with blue, gray, yellow and believe it or not Green. Well the here’s how each color is looking like, the grey shade is hardly recognizable, so end up feeling confused as to whether there is any rating or not. The blue looks pretty much similar to words in a link which gets automatically bolded out. Green also has the same problem, looking similar to the URL of the linked title. The best one seems to be the yellow, as it is very prominent and eye catching. But the arguments stays that yellow is also very similar to orange, so why the change.

Image Source: http://allgoogletesting.blogspot.in/2014/08/google-tests-different-colors-for-stars.html

Google has also not made it clear as to from when would it officially go for the change. The colors of the search results are still reflecting the orange color for the majority of the users. But if All Google Testing is to be believed, then it seems users can enable the test themselves. All they need to do is insert updated codes into their browsers. The fallacy being that most of the tests results are showing a full five star rating, irrespective of whatever their original rating is. For e.g. any search result without the test enabled will show the original rating, alternately the result when done with the test environment enabled, will show full five stars leading to a confusion in the mind of the users. Though in Google’s defense they are still in the experimenting stage, they are still to officially launch it. Hopefully it will bring in some positive changes for the users. Hopefully it will not meet the fate of Google authorship.