Generally when a site changes its favicon (the tiny image that typically appears next to the URL in your browser) nobody really notices or cares. Unless you’re Google.

Back in June the company unveiled a brand new stylized ‘g’ icon with a blue background.
It was sleek, but a big departure from the classic G logo that everyone was familiar with.

The blue icon made appearances elsewhere, too, and can now be seen on the Google iPhone Mobile App.

Now it looks like the company has switched again, this time to a logo that incorporates the same stylized lowercase g, but one that also includes the company’s classic yellow/blue/green/red color scheme.

Marrisa Mayer, the company’s Vice President, Search Products & User Experience had this to say last time the company made a change:

“The reason is that we wanted to develop a set of icons that would scale better to some new platforms like the iPhone and other mobile devices.

So the new favicon is one of those, but we’ve also developed a group of logo-based icons that all hang together as a unified set.”

Mayer also noted in the same blog post that the blue logo wasn’t necessarily the would Google would settle on, so today’s change isn’t much of a surprise:

“By no means is the one you’re seeing our favicon final; it was a first step to a more
unified set of icons.”

Google’s current set of logos (up until today) can be seen below. No word on whether today’s change is indicative of any upcoming changes for the whole suite of logos:

Google has developed hundreds of possible favicons that have never been implemented, sprawling many different styles. Here’s a sampling that they shared last June: