# Has your Google gone to a sans-serif font?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-your-google-gone-to-a-sans-serif-font/927159>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [December 4, 2020, 12:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-your-google-gone-to-a-sans-serif-font/927159 "2020-12-04T00:53:40Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\
**Post date:** [December 4, 2020, 12:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-your-google-gone-to-a-sans-serif-font/927159/1 "2020-12-04T00:53:40Z")

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Note the Google splash page, but the search results. They look different. I think they’ve switched to a sans serif font?

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**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\
**Post date:** [December 4, 2020, 2:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-your-google-gone-to-a-sans-serif-font/927159/2 "2020-12-04T02:06:25Z")

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It’s always been sans-serif for me. However, I note that I always change my default font to sans-serif, as I find those easier to read on a screen.

The current source shows that it uses Roboto, a webfont created by Google, then falls back to Arial (a standard sans-serif font) and then finally just “sans-serif”, which just uses whatever the default sans-serif font is on your device. The Roboto part looks newer than the other two, as it is only used once, while the others are specified in multiple places.

But I’ve looked through screenshots of the results pages as far back as 2015, and they all seem to use sans-serif fonts. The last time Google used default fonts was apparently in 2014, when they did a design refresh.

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**Author:** ![kenobi\_65](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kenobi_65/32/13178_2.png) [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)\
**Post date:** [December 4, 2020, 2:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-your-google-gone-to-a-sans-serif-font/927159/3 "2020-12-04T02:12:32Z")

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One new thing I’ve noticed is that, in the past day or two, a new sans-serif font is being used on Google search result pages. Below is a screenshot I just took of a Google search result – on the right side, the words “The Straight Dope” (which I highlighted with a red box) seems to be a new/different font.

I’ve seen this font before, on other Google sites (like Google Forms, which I use regularly at work), but I don’t think I’ve seen it on search pages.

[![](https://i.imgur.com/DwFUbBL.jpg) ](https://i.imgur.com/DwFUbBL.jpg)

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\
**Post date:** [December 4, 2020, 2:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-your-google-gone-to-a-sans-serif-font/927159/4 "2020-12-04T02:13:51Z")

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That’s what I was thinking of, yes, but couldn’t do the screen-shot wizardry.

It looks like a different font to me, but I can’t remember what the font used to look like.