Google now appears to be conducting comparative testing of its Material Design-inspired Google Sans font in Google search results for mobile. For clarity, that’s the search results card generated by a web-based search rather than the Google app. With that out of the way, the appearance of Google Sans in search isn’t altogether surprising since it’s been making an appearance in a lot of Google apps and services over the past several weeks. Most recently, that includes its addition to a suspected Material Design revamp that’s in the work for Android Messages. It’s worth pointing out that this new testing is an A/B affair. That’s a type of test where two designs or variations are used simultaneously and compared so that adjustments can be made as needed to the next iteration. So it certainly won’t be showing up on everybody’s Android handset just yet. However, this does put it one step closer to being released on a much wider scale.
As to the font itself, this is one of a few fonts Google has been working on to widen its inventory of usable typefaces. Prior to this, Google search has typically used a more standard Arial font for sans-serif type and Times New Roman for serif type. Google Sans is a sans-serif font that is a progression of the company’s Product Sans typeface – which is used in its logos. In short, it’s noticeably wider than the Android-specific Roboto font and has a slightly more rounded appearance than Product Sans and has been optimized for scaling up or down in size. Its use in search brings a higher level of consistency to the page, due to the Google logo’s appearance at the top left-hand corner after a search is performed. Namely, that’s because it gives result titles a more consistent look with the page title. It also matches up nicely with Roboto, Arial, and Helvetica Neue fonts that it appears alongside it in search results.
Setting that aside, there’s no way to know for sure when this change will roll out on a wider scale. That’s going to depend entirely on how many changes are required and whether any tweaks need to be made to the overall layout to accommodate the new font. However, a couple of images of the font in action – included below – were provided by the source.
