Serifs I like in long lines of text. Drop shadows I dislike strongly, for the most part. Gradients also tend to rub me the wrong way, depending on how they’re done. I like the “flat” look. Is this too far? I personally don’t think so. Personally, I think pretty much every Google logo revision has been better, although this newest one is marginal. The last iteration was quite nice. The ones before it with the ugly drop shadows and faux 3D-ness look inferior to me.
And then there’s the monstrosity that is the original Stanford Google logo graphic.
Normally I would be the type who siad he dind’t care. But this one just looks bad. At least, the favicon does. The one when you actually search, with a capital G instead of a lowercase one looks fine. Okay, the G itself still doesn’t look great, but it looks fine.
But the rainbow-G in a white circle looks horrible, and doesn’t look like an icon that would fit a search engine. It feels like a relic from a bygone area–when search engines are all about seeming up to date.
Personally, I like 2010-2013 the most. It just makes it stand out on the page a bit better. I think I might have liked the next one better if they’d gone with a bit darker with it, though.
Oh, they used a normal “g” instead of that weirdo squiggly thingy with the bump on top. I’m fine with that I guess
Now they need to get rid of the multi-color non-sense, or at least the yellow. I’d prefer Google.
I like the new one, except the top of the G looks a little incomplete - I realise it’s entirely consistent and proper for the font that has been used, but the angle looks a bit wrong (it’s not wrong).
I’ve already forgotten.
I came in to say this, it seems like a childish font.
Old one. Sesame Street, blah, blah, blah…
I doubt I would have noticed had they not made such a big deal about it, partly because it seems like every day is a day for a special Google doodle instead of the regular logo.
It does come across as childish. This is because the majority of the stroke weight changes are so small as to be pretty much invisible to the naked eye, and the use of perfect circular geometry. This isn’t usually done when designing fonts since this is the result you will get. I’m sure they decided to do this to make it look more friendly as well as to get that swirled-G animation to look “natural”. If the line weight changed much, the swoop would become weird or exaggerated looking.
The old Google logo was looking rather tired. It was made a while ago, right as the internet really took off, and it shows. Serif is not Google’s “style” any more. They want a hip, modern, fresh, friendly look and that says “sans-serif”. Also, sans-serif works better at smaller sizes on digital screens. So I agree that the logo needed an update, but I’m not sure if this is ideal.
Regardless, Google probably realized that too and went with the best compromise they could come up with in order to get what they wanted. I’m sure they spent years and a lot of money to come to this conclusion.
To me, not noticing a change like this is like not noticing your cat was replaced with another cat :o 
Plain and boring.
Coming back to font geekery again:
After taking the time to look at Futura (which this logo is similar to in that Futura has geometrically perfect Os and and only minor differences in stroke weight) I realized that what also doesn’t help is that the G in the Google logo is proportionally large compared to the lower case letters. Generally, the X-height (the height of lowercase letters, i.e. an x) is higher than half the word height. So this misbalance in the x-height as well as the slightly-too-short top G curve contributes to a weird off-kilter childish look.
I like the G animation a lot, but it uses a different stroke weight than the logo itself does, which is a bit odd. I’d have used the same thicker weight.
There’s actually a whole class of fonts that follow this: geometric sans serifs. Century Gothic (one of my favorite fonts, so it’s no surprise I like the new logo) is a typical example. (ETA: And Futura, as you noted, is another.) They were very popular with the Bauhaus school.
I voted that I prefer the new logo, but I agree that it looks very childish.
My reason for preferring the new logo is the lowercase g font. I would be a very happy person if we could eliminate the typographic g (I call it the “squiggly g”) and replace it with something like the hand-written g. (I feel the same about a, for that matter).
They actually created a whole typeface to go with it, too, Product Sans (Warning:PDF). The logo is based on that typeface, but the “e” appears to be customized for the logo itself, so perhaps that’s why it looks a bit jarring.
I think that’s the one thing that’s been bothering me about it. The G is that much bigger - fine, whatever. It’s a style choice, no problem. But the font weight is the same as the rest of the text, which, along with the larger size, makes the G look skinnier than the rest and a bit ‘off’.
That said, I don’t know if it would look any better if the G were thicker to make up for the larger size.
Same. There might be a few things I care less about than font nerdery, but not many.
Honestly did not even notice. New logo? How the hell would I ever know, they change it all the time.