November seemed to be the month where Japan’s search engines decided to change their results pages. Both major search engines, Google Japan and Yahoo! Japan, changed the design of their search engine results pages (SERPs). Here’s a look at how they’re looking since the changes were rolled out.

Google Japan revamping the SERPs

This news probably won’t come as a surprise to other Google users outside of Japan. After Google US started implementing the new SERP design on 6 November, two weeks later Google Japan applied these changes to their SERPs as well.

The search tools, which used to be on the left side of the result pages, are now at the top. This redesign opens up more space for the results in general and the knowledge graph/Google+ results on the right hand side.

The next image shows an example of the second change relating to Google+ results. This section is either reserved for the knowledge graph for searches of informative nature, or for the Google+ page for searches on businesses or brands.

The Google+ graph gives a short introduction of the profile with the most important facts and snippets of the latest posts made on the profile.

Yahoo!Japan Renewing Their Real-time Result Page

After the latest integration of Facebook in the real-time search results, Yahoo! Japan seems to have decided to implement some more updates and improvements for the real-time search category.

This time, the desktop version as well as the mobile version experienced some major updates regarding user experience and design. SERP structure and elements were replaced or redesigned. The keyword graph is now on the top right and above the current hot topic keyword terms.

Older search results are now loaded by just scrolling down, and therefore work the same way as on Twitter. The design of the tool bar on the top also changed and buttons were replaced with drop down menus to make it look cleaner.

The user interface for the mobile version went through an even bigger makeover with a new design of the SERP and a new navigation menu.

Yahoo! Japan announced that these changes are just the beginning and that further updates and improvement in regards to user experience are going to be made in future.