Douglas Bowman, the top visual designer at Google, recently left to lead the design team at Twitter. Bowman shares the dynamics of Google’s data driven design – one small change to a link color on Google.com can affect the bottom line in large dollar amounts.

At Twitter, Bowman will have the toughest job as an interface designer. He now has millions of critics to comment instantly on his design implementations. This is the future of all websites, thus the need for a strong balance and philosophy on utilizing customer feedback for design and application direction.

I also take Bowman moving to Twitter as yet another indication that search is evolving. Search.twitter.com is a great search tool, a bit coarse and sometimes distorted, but the best resource for live search. Mahalo.com is also a good resource for social search, more refined in the vein of Wikipedia. And finally, for shopping,  Scour.com will pay you to search and provide discounts for purchasing.

The NY Times calls this the Age of Google. Twitter is not the next Google, but Google is nearing the end of its Age. Search is young and entering a new era.

Read: Data, Not Design, Is King in the Age of Google

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