Google is testing black links to search results - a departure from its long-standing blue links - by rolling them out to certain users, who are seemingly randomly selected.
The search engine is known for conducting frequent A/B tests, in which two different versions of a Web page are distributed and users' responses to each are monitored, to establish which performs better.
In 2014, Google UK MD Dan Cobley reported the company ran "forty... experiments showing all the shades of blue you could possibly imagine" for advertisement links in Gmail. Cobley said determining which hue made users most inclined to click on the links earned Google an extra $200 million that year in advertising revenue.
#BringBackTheBlue
While most Google users prefer purpler to greener shades of blue, according to Cobley, early results indicate they are not partial to black links.
Several irate users are tweeting #BringBackTheBlue, telling Google they feel black is a poor colour choice for hyperlinks.
"Really doesn't make a lot of sense, 'hey guys, let's make hyperlinks impossible to find at a glance!'" said @RossTomsic on Twitter.
"Not a fan of the black [links]. Can't tell what links I've clicked on," said @TDeLingua in another #BringBackTheBlue tweet.
"The blue link (underlined or not) has been around for so long that it's become borderline dogma for Web design," writes Lance Ulanoff for Mashable, adding that "at the dawn of the modern World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, who is often regarded as the father of the Internet, chose blue underlined text because, it is believed, it stood out from all the black text surrounding it".
At present, the majority of unlinked text on both Web sites and social networks continues to be black, rendering black links in the world's most popular search engine unintuitive to the majority of users.
Google has responded briefly to queries about the test. "We're always running many small-scale experiments with the design of the results page. We're not quite sure that black is the new blue."
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