Search giant Google has recently made one little mod to its visual appearance: it has chanced its old favicon with a brand spanking new one (hooray for Google). Just in case you do not know what a favicon is, here is a succinct and to the point explanation: a favicon is the rather minuscule icon that shows up in the address bar whenever you load up a web page.

VP, Search Products and User Experience, Marissa Mayer and, Web Design Lead, Micheal Lopez comment: “Back in June, we rolled out a new favicon — the small icon that greets you when you access Google on your URL bar or your bookmarks list — and we encouraged our users to submit their ideas for this important piece of Google branding. We were impressed by the volume of submissions we received, and today we are happy to introduce a new Google favicon inspired by those submissions by our users. While the final icon is a reinterpretation of one contest submission, it draws on design elements and ideas from many of them.

Even though the Google home page (the traditional one, not iGoogle) is a pretty simple one (and to be completely honest I like its simplicity, it bareness), this does not mean its favicon has to remain unchanged. Those of you keeping track of these things might remember that apart from last year’s favicon redesign, the last time Google made any changes to it was more than eight years ago.

The new Google favicon, which you can see in the picture in the upper left corner, has been designed by a computer science undergraduate student at the University of Campinas in Brazil going y the name of André Resende. According to Google, his design captured the essence of the Mountain View search giant. Despite that, the guys at Google couldn’t help themselves and tinkered with Andre’s design; they moved the letter “g” off center and modified the color layout.