They moved their navigation around. It has no AdSense on it I notice. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060326-6460.html
It sure does have AdSense on it. http://weblogs.rssplanet.com/google/news/2006/03/20/google-gets-a-facelift-new-beta-design I'm in the beta program and that's all I see now is that design.
I don't think you can, you're just 'selected' to be part of it. I never even knew about it, I just suddenly started seeing the new layout and figured it was a new design and I was part of the new beta program.
I don't think it's anything for April fool's, they wouldn't go out of their way this much just to pull a 'joke'.
This UI is optimized for Googlebase. Search for a clear product category and you'll get the Googlebase search box in your face. i.e., Cars, Real Estate, etc. My personal opinion is this is the beginning of the end for organic search traffic. If this UI is the future they are pushing all the traffic away from traditional organic listings. The only ones that will prosper are the huge directory/listing services that can spam Gbase with millions of items. -jay
My guess is that google will need to change the interface in order to keep users getting blind from ads and of course to make improvements in the UI as people's habits change over time.
That is really odd. I am certain when I tried it out the first time no adsense showed up. But now when I try it again it is there like normal. I agree with the comment about having "Blog Search" there. In general I think it is an interesting idea with the "page rank" indicators next to the various alt searches. Its an indication that Google might finally be trying to integrate there various other facets into search.
I can't get it to work. Do you think Google changed something to prevent people from getting the "peak?"