Google Search Knowledge Graph is testing an awesome Material Design makeover

While watching the Ubisoft Forward event which took place yesterday (yes, Stadia was taken off of the Assassin’s Creed Mirage blog post for some reason), I saw an advertisement for something called Mythic Quest. Some of you may have already heard of this awesome show about a fake game studio making a fake game, but I hadn’t.

While Googling the show and subsequently its cast, I discovered on one of my accounts that the knowledge graph for Google Search is displayed in an entirely new format. In fact, it displayed in Material Design! Check it out below – each segment relating to the actor in question shows in a colorful box with rounded corners.

In typical Material Design 2 fashion, Google is using a gradient background as a backdrop to each of the “cards”, all of which show the actor’s spouse, height, biography, and related pictures or videos. The standard “smart chips” still appear above this graph, showing movies and TV shows he has worked on, as well as the overview you see above, news related to him, and videos and interviews he appears in.

If you search for your favorite celebrity or really anything, you’ll find that your knowledge graph panel looks quite plain, and this is in fact a new design. I’m not sure if it’s being A/B tested, or if I just got lucky and encountered it before others, but it is pretty slick, wouldn’t you say?

Here’s the old design, and it’s look very 2021 Google with plain text, hyperlinks, and simple separators for each bit of information. Let me know what you think in the comments below about the new Material Design (or is it Material You?) knowledge graph panel. I wonder what will get the “Google touch” next!