Google Search On Desktop Is Getting “Dark Mode”

Are we about to see dark mode in Google Search?

After Google rolled out Gmail dark mode for iOS and Android back in 2020, it seems the company decided it’s time to let dark mode spread to Search on desktop.

Google first started testing dark mode (or dark theme) for its Search interface back in December 2020, however, over the past few days more and more people have noticed the dark theme showing up in Google Search on desktop – and mobile.

As always, with Google feature rollouts, Google Search dark mode seems to be a part of an A/B test and as such is not available to all searchers just yet. Nonetheless, many users on Windows 10 and macOS are getting a notification inviting them to try the “new dark theme”.

The downside of Google Search Dark mode, however, concerns ads. As a Twitter user with a very colourful handle showed ads will be quite tricky to distinguish when dark mode is enabled.

No problem. Here’s desktop and mobile.

So I realized it was default on my pixel if I just do the standard swipe up search, and realized ads were so much harder to see..

Google must have noticed the spike in ad clicks and quickly rolled it out everywhere. Shady fucks pic.twitter.com/q1gFvDAu1c

— GOOGLE AMP BLOWS (@AMP_blows) February 10, 2021

At this stage, unless Google fixes the difficulty of differentiating ads from organic results, marketers using Google Ads may see their ads click-through rate impacted by Google Search dark mode.

In 2020, we’ve witnessed a lot of Google’s products gaining a native dark mode like Google Play app, Google Translate, Google Docs, Google Chrome on desktop and many others. Time will only tell how searchers will react and be affected by the global release of the Search dark mode.