How To: Put Google's Search Tools Back on the Left Sidebar

Last month, Google changed the placement of search options from the left side of the page to the top, right above the first result. In theory, this shouldn't be such a bad thing—it's just looks, right? Well, not quite. Turns out, it actually got rid of a few of the options as well, and a lot of people were not too happy about it.

The problem is that the change gives you less functionality, and makes the options that are still there harder to get to. One of the most frustrating changes was how much more difficult it was to search by image size. There are tricks to searching images by size without the old tools, but it's still too laborious. Luckily, Google did bring back the "Larger than..." search function for images, but it still is missing the option to input your own dimensions.

The good news, though, is that if you want to reverse Google's little "improvement," there's a way to do it.

For Firefox and Chrome users, there's an add-on called Stylish that lets you install themes for sites like Google, Facebook, and YouTube. Once you've installed it, you need to download a userstyle called "Google Search options/filters to the left". All you have to do is click Install with Stylish.

The end result won't look exactly like it did before, but the search criteria will be on the left side, and you'll actually have a few more options than you did before. Here's what it looks like for me:

You can find Stylish for Firefox here and Chrome here. If you use a different browser, or have Greasemonkey installed on Firefox, there's also a userscript that you can install to do the same thing.

What about you? Is there anyone who actually prefers the change? Let us know what you think in the comments.