Wired Reports on 'Googlemania'

Decaffeinated Jedi writes "As a tie-in with its March 2004 cover story on the search phenomenon that is Google, Wired has posted its Complete Guide to Googlemania. Written before Google delayed its IPO earlier this month, the feature nevertheless offers a series of interesting articles focused on the search engine giant. Particularly interesting sections include Googlemaniacs (in which 'superusers' like Matt Groening and Garry Trudeau discuss how they use Google on a daily basis), a look at how blog comment spammers have taken advantage of Google's PageRank system, and a gallery of hypothetical interface redesigns by a group of artists and graphic designers."

Comments

Microsoft versus Google

[erick99]

Microsoft will eventually integrate a search engine into Windows just as they are going to integrate an anti-virus product and have already integrated MediaPlayer. It's just a matter of when. If Google really was offered $10 billion by Microsoft and turned it down, then they were stupid.

Happy Trails!

Erick

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[NanoGator]

"Microsoft will eventually integrate a search engine into Windows just as they are going to integrate an anti-virus product and have already integrated MediaPlayer. It's just a matter of when."

So? That doesn't mean they'll kill Google. What will kill Google is if MS's search engine is better. I don't see that happening for a couple of iterations.

"If Google really was offered $10 billion by Microsoft and turned it down, then they were stupid." ....

10 billion? With a b, billion? Why on Earth would Microsoft spend half of their money on a search engine?

Guess that's another one to submit to Snopes.com.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[Anonymous Coward]

If Google was bought out by Microsoft, and you prefer not to use Windows, would you have to install Windows just to use a decent search engine?

I, for one, hope that Google stays the way it is. Simple, fast, powerful, and reasonably free.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Offtopic dude, you are screwed.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[wed128]

I think if it was good, integrating an antivirus product into Windows would be damn responsible...

hell, the antivirus industry is almost completely their fault anyway...

MICROSOFT GIVETH, MICROSOFT TAKETH AWAY...

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[Anonymous Coward]

be more subtle, it's /dev/. ;-)

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[maliabu]

So? That doesn't mean they'll kill Google. What will kill Google is if MS's search engine is better.

sometimes being better doesn't mean anything. Was IE better than Netscape during the browser war? or was it just because MS preinstalled IE in all Windows, and Windows happens to be one of the most used OS?

and nowadays, Opera, Mozilla etc must be better than IE? but are they taking over IE's market share?

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[NanoGator]

" Was IE better than Netscape during the browser war? or was it just because MS preinstalled IE in all Windows, and Windows happens to be one of the most used OS?"

Yes, IE was better than Netscape. It wasn't at first. It was lacking in many ways, and as a result, people flocked towards Netscape. When version 4 came out of both apps, Microsoft had gotten their act together, and suddenly Netscape wasn't such an interesting browser anymore. They just weren't doing enough to make their app better.

Microsoft didn't win because IE was preinstalled, it won because it was a better browser. If what you were saying was true, then Netscape would never have had half the marketshare.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[Thanatopsis]

Sorry but Microsoft has already done this - currently searches in IE, bad domains, and failed DNS lookups go to Microsoft Search. The problem is the search experience is SO POOR that users still prefer Google. As far being stupid for a 10 Billion dollar offer, Google knows the public markets hold much more money for them. Bill was undoubtedly offering a stock swap deal, not a cash buyout. Investors will see much more money in an IPO. Keep this in mind, Google's revenue is well over 1 Billion annually. (According to my sources 1.2 or so.) The margin on search is quite high so they undoubtedly highly profitable. They have no need to go public other than to pay off their initial VC. As the article points out, going public has it's own pains. A Google IPO where they float 20% of the company is probably a 20 Billion dollar event. You do the math, still think they were stupid to turn down Gates. Nope.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla? No thanks, I'll stick with firefox

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[ixplodestuff8]

reasonably free? as opposed to unreasonably free?

"That search engine was unreasonably free, I mean It was over 100x more free than other free search engines"

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[evilquaker]

Microsoft didn't win because IE was preinstalled, it won because it was a better browser.

Wrong (and right). IE won because it was a better browser. But the only reason it was better was that it was preinstalled. Featurewise, both browsers were about equal... but IE was already there, and it was good enough, so there was no reason to download Netscape.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[Dukael_Mikakis]

Why on Earth would Microsoft spend half of their money on a search engine?

Economics says that $10 billion is what Google's worth (in Microsoft's perception) or, more likely, since Google rejected the offer, $10 billion is less than what they believe Google's value to be. That's why.

It doesn't matter if it's half their money or all of their money, if Microsoft assesses a certain value to a company, they'll be willing to make the corresponding offer. (They've done so before).

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[lawpoop]

This is different. Google has won the search engine wars. It's not up for grabs anymore. This means that people will seek out google on their fresh-from-the-showroom pc, no matter what Microsoft has plopped in front of them. The only way MS can get them to switch now is to provide something better than google. Unlikely, IMHO.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[NanoGator]

" But the only reason it was better was that it was preinstalled. Featurewise, both browsers were about equal... but IE was already there, and it was good enough, so there was no reason to download Netscape."

Wrong. IE 4+ didn't crash when you looked at it the wrong way. They couldn't even get Netscape to be stable while running in Linux, can't blame Windows for that.

There's a reason the term "Nutscrape" became quite prevalent in the net culture.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Unreasonably free as in you have to register with a credit card/driver's license/social security number/European equivalents just to use the free service.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[tealover]

Yeah, but Opera is not a standalone application. It's just a web link. It doesn't need to be installed or downloaded.

I don't think Google has to worry about Microsoft pulling out the rug from underneath it. As long as browsers are around, *anyone* can Google.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[tealover]

Oops. I meant Google, not Opera.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[NanoGator]

"It doesn't matter if it's half their money or all of their money..."

OOooh yes it does, especially in a publically held company in the tech market. This move wouldn't be allowed unless there were assurances that the 10 billion dollars in assets could be quickly turned into 20 billion.

It's a lot easier to take risks like that with tens of millions of dollars, not billions.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[055*]

I think that it it is not really important if Microsoft will kill Google or not. How much money they decided to spend for this procedure also, if they considered to make this step , it means that the goal is justifyed.For me for example, is good to know that the search engin works well and I don't care which name it is going to use.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[evilquaker]

Wrong. IE 4+ didn't crash when you looked at it the wrong way.

You're right... IE 4 didn't just crash, it exploded spectacularly, and took down your whole desktop to boot.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[NanoGator]

"You're right... IE 4 didn't just crash, it exploded spectacularly, and took down your whole desktop to boot."

Heh. Perhaps. (Way to dodge my "wasn't stable in Linux" comment.) That's still far less frequent than what happened with NS.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[qewl]

Maybe I'm alone here, but I was thinking about all the ways one could change the net's history just by registering the domain google.com before those Stanford guys got it. Or slashdot.org. I just find it interesting the way regular people could have changed the internet in the recent past. Would I have been offered thousands for the domain google.com? Or would they just create their search engine under a different URL.. maybe like doogle.com?! It's always fun to think about these things.

Hey, I could be reading dotslash.org right now! :)

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[Ciderx]

That's rubbish. Having designed desktop systems at a University and made sure that both Netscape and IE were fully installed, had equal capabilities with regards to plugins etc on several thousand student access machines, I can tell you, the pre-installed argument is rubbish. Netscape 4.x and beyond were just nowhere near the standard of IE 5.x and above.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[evilquaker]

Netscape 4.x and beyond were just nowhere near the standard of IE 5.x and above.

Did you pay attention to the previous discussion? The argument was about NS 4 vs. IE 4... IE 4 was when IE really won the browser war, so arguments about how IE5 is superior are pointless.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[Dukael_Mikakis]

Right, and those risks are incorporated into the fair market value (deceptive, though, because Google is still private). Microsoft is a huge corporation with a huge pool of self-interested investors run by people who only seek to increase shareholder value (viva capitalistas!). You make a good point about the risk of $10 billion, but the fact that Microsoft made the offer (regardless of what fraction of cash reserves this offer represents) means that Microsoft assessed the risk (I'm sure they did) and either deemed it not too risky, or a risky investment with potential payoffs that made it worthwhile.

Additionally, there don't even necessarily need to be any assurances about the payoffs. All that matters is the NPV (including factors such as volatility, discount rates, etc.) is positive. It doesn't matter if they pay $10 billion now and the $20 billion payoff comes 10 years down the road, if the present value of that $20 billion 10 years from now is $10 billion and one penny then (technically) it's a good investment.

The fact that the payoff is 10 years from now does not matter at all to the investor because he/she can always sell it for what it's worth today in the free market (though it is almost always -- excluding deflation -- true that a $20 bn payoff tomorrow will be worth more than a $20 bn payoff in 10 years).

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[bonzomcgrue]

10 billion? With a b, billion? Why on Earth would Microsoft spend half of their money on a search engine? Guess that's another one to submit to Snopes.com.

Huh? Microsoft has a market capitalization of $290 billion. Yes, that's billion, with a b. Even if they decided to pay cash, they could easily do this with some of the $50 billion in cash on their balance sheet. Again, billion with a b.

From the speculation I've seen on the valuation of Google after an IPO, it looks like the markets are expected to value Google somewhere between $10 billion and $30 billion. Yes, that's a ton of moolah. Moolah with an m.

Here's a quick snapshot of Microsoft's financial profile.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[damiam]

There's also a reason the term "Internet Exploder" became prevalent in net culture. It doesn't just crash, it takes everything else down with it.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[bagsc]

If someone offers you $10 billion dollars for something, and you think may be worth more, you turn it down. Because, once you tell everyone else the minimum you're worth is $10 billion, you create a market mechanism to prop the company up to at least that price. MS won't attempt a hostile takeover because of the anti-trust implications, but its nice to have a $10 billion offer to fall back on.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[Anonymous Coward]

> Windows happens to be one of the most used OS?

Say what!!!??? Windows "happens" to be one of the most used OS?

Surely you are new here!!

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[ealar dlanvuli]

Was IE better than Netscape during the browser war? or was it just because MS preinstalled IE in all Windows, and Windows happens to be one of the most used OS?

IE was much better than NS at the 4.x version. Most people continued using Netscape until then.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[1u3hr]

sometimes being better doesn't mean anything.

Pirates of Silicon Valley:
Jobs: "Our stuff is better."
Gates: "Ya don't get it Steve, that doesn't matter."

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[JPriest]

WHERE does it say they are intigrating an anti virus system in windows? The "security center" tells you if an AV progie is installed and enabled. SHOW ME where Microsoft is using it's own AV program. I saw the post too, try to RTFA. Slashdot is blind hate.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[JPriest]

reasonably free?"
Yes, like speech.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[Cybersonic]

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2004/feb0 4/02-24RSA2004KeynotePR.asp

"This approach begins with Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), currently in beta release. In his keynote address, Gates demonstrated new enhancements to Windows XP, including the new Windows Security Center, which will enable users to automatically check the status of essential security features, such as firewall, automatic update and anti-virus functionality. When a problem is detected, customers will receive a notification and recommended steps to help them improve security."

Personally, I dont think Microsoft should be bundling this with Windows... Im suprised the full blown MS Money is not in there yet, would be a 'typical Microsoft way' to take out Quicken...

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[MindNet]

What kind of crack are you smoking? IE gained popularity because of two things:

1) They pre-installed the browser with the OS.
2) They fucked around with browser implementation standards.

IE wasn't better. Microsoft included their own tags and "VB script" that would make it's browser do things that Netscape couldn't.

When web site developers foolishly started using these proprietary tags, web site viewers realized that half the sites they were going to didn't work "properly" in Netscape, and Netscape lost marketshare.

Netscape didn't get the nickname "Nutscrape" from users who know what they were talking about, it got the name from people who preferred the glitz and galmour of all the cool, new, RFC breaking features that IE provided.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[JPriest]

I saw the damn screenshot of security center and it looks like

"NORTON AV IS INSTLLED BUT NOT ENABLED: WARNING"

MS may release API's to be used by third party vendors but nowhere does it say they are writing thier own AV progie. Slashdot is wrong.

_A_ screenshot here

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[sydneyfong]

Netscape didn't even have a product since Version 4, while IE kept releasing new versions of their browsers, IE4, IE5, IE5.5, etc. If one was to compare the latest and best browser from both sides, at the time IE5 was out, then NS4 vs IE5 would be a fair comparison, since Moz didn't have a stable version of their product until years later.

Besides, having written web pages catering both browsers that that time, NS was a bitch to work with. It didn't render correctly, was slow, had numerous bugs, and had a limited featureset. OTOH, IE4+ was simply great. In the end, I simply resolved to a "Best viewed for IE" approach.

Of course, with Moz/Firefox/etc things have changed now, but back then IE was the superior browser.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[efextra]

If Google was bought out by Microsoft, and you prefer not to use Windows, would you have to install Windows just to use a decent search engine?

You mean now you can't use MSN search from Linux?

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[aftk2]

Netscape didn't get the nickname "Nutscrape" from users who know what they were talking about, it got the name from people who preferred the glitz and galmour of all the cool, new, RFC breaking features that IE provided.

Bwahaha. Does 'document.layers' mean anything to you? Netscape was a standards nightmare, and tried just as fervently as Internet Explorer to shove its proprietary tags and JavaScript down your throat. IE at version 4 was decent, and IE at version 5 (released in early 1999, I believe) was so much better than Netscape.

Initially, Netscape was great. Indeed, it was pretty much the only useable option for awhile in the mid-90s. But they got complacent, and then they just got terrible. There was a reason the Mozilla folks decided to completely rewrite the core of the browser for Netscape 6. Yes, IE's dominance of the browser market was accelerated by the fact that the browser shipped as the operating system's default, but it was so much better that it's victory was inevitable.

History repeats itself. No sooner than IE is declared the victor in this latest browser war, its development grows stagnant. The trouble this time is that Netscape never had an operating system Monopoly against which to leverage itself.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[Anonymous Coward]

That's completely wrong. Can you point out to me what proprietary tags that IE included? Let's see, there is document.all in IE as opposed to document.layers in netscape, both of which W3C rejected for document.getElementByID which *IS* in IE5 and 6. Now, if you want to talk about the DOM. I think ALL the CSS/DHTML style standards are correct, i.e., if you do document.all.style.SOMETHING, the "something" is part of the W3C standard even as it exists today. Netscape's (4.0) support for CSS on the other hand is ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE. Very little actually is supported. Thus, you can't do anything like innerHTML, or innerTEXT in DIVs. You have to open a layer, write to it, then close it again. Ugh. What if I just wanted to change the background color of a layer/div? As far as I know, this is near impossible, because you need to write the WHOLE layer, that includes all the stuff that is IN that layer to begin with. That means you have to hard-code all your layer html in a javascript variable, rather than going document.all["someid"].style.backgroundColor="blue "

Also along the lines of DHTML, Netscape (4.0) is MADE to display static pages. It IS not made to have things able to be resized, have table cells dynamically added etc. Ever wonder why when you resize a Netscape 4 browser window, that the ENTIRE PAGE RELOADS??? That's because it cannot dynamically move the elements around without reloading the whole page, which IE4 COULD do. That's why you can't change any widths or heights in netscape dynamically...unless you want to refresh the whole page. That's also why in Netscape you have to wait for it to get the size of all the pictures before you can see more text: because it doesn't know how to move text around dynamically. Remember the old rule of "make sure you specify height and width to make the page load faster." IE can move text around dynamically which means the user can start reading before it knows the exact dimension of every image.

Also, IE4 had Iframes and Netscape didn't. And on and on and on.

Come on, I know we all HATE Microsoft, but when we start arguing that a product that is OBVIOUSLY inferior, is actually 100x times better, it just makes GENUINE arguments about Microsoft's security/business practices seem that less credible to the listener.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[Anonymous Coward]

The reality is, netscape was once a product FOR SALE. And netscape had a huge IPO and future ahead of it.

Of course Microsoft would eventually kill them off--all they had to do was sell windows and bundle the competing application to do it.

This is exactly what MS will continue doing until sanity is restored in the market--by force of law if necessary. They will simply scan the horizon for emerging technologies, clone them, claim to be "an innovator, enhancing the user's experience" and that will be that.

It's not so much that consumers suffer--MS has to make a product reasonably comparable to that of the company they are attempting to kill off--the real horror is that it makes people and companies not want to invest in young, up and coming companies.

This is a devastating thing, when there is simply no use trying to do something new, because you know in your heart and mind that the laws of your country are not being enforced, and the media is being manipulated.

You should take the time to read about the railroad industries, general motors, IBM, and yes, Microsoft--and MS' issues with borland, novell, stac, netscape and ibm. Once you have done that reading, you're opinion will mean a lot more. Clearly you don't know much about the history of the internet if you don't realize that netscape once sold their browser.

The very best thing for the consumer is a variety of vendors competing for their money! That means interoperable computers, running different software, and different hardware. The only reason ActiveX exists is because MS can get away with it.

Freedom of choice is American, it's the way things should work...and the law agrees. Personally I use Linux and keep my wallet close. Fuck MS.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatcha gonna do, brother when Googlemania runs wild all over you? All the little Googlesters take your vitamins, install linux and say your prayers.
Check out these 24 inch pythons, brother.

USA USA

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[NanoGator]

" Clearly you don't know much about the history of the internet if you don't realize that netscape once sold their browser."

Actually, I'm well aware of it, seeing as how I plunked down cash for 3.0 'Gold'.

Maybe you shouldn't let your extreme views get in the way of rational judgement? You just bombarded me with a rebuttal that heavily relied on a false assumption.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[GarfBond]

What IE4 did you use? IE4 was notorious for crashing, and crashing hard. If IE4 crashed, it was very likely to take out your system along with it too. It wasn't until IE5 that they had gotten their act together: decent standards support (for the time), less crashiness, and better enough over NS4 (which had pretty much stagnated around 4.5-4.7 by then)

IE4 on Win98 was slightly better, but only because they had updated it a bit and put in some more hooks into the OS. IE4 on Win95 was crap, simply because it *was* so crashy. CNET even took away the editor's choice from IE4 for this one simple reason.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[Killswitch1968]

What a fantastic post. Congrats to you and the mods who modded this up. Too companies people treat MS as a universal scapegoat of their own shortcomings as a business.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[my02wrxsti]

I am pretty sure that Microsoft has cash reserves of at least US$54 billion at last count. This means that US$10 billion is a possible if still ridiculous quantity of money.

Here is a c|net article that talks about their position last year: clicky clicky.

Richard.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[Moofie]

er, sometimes having marketshare doesn't mean anything. Is IE better than Netscape because it has a bigger marketshare?

And nowadays, Opera, Mozilla, etc are all READY FOR ANYBODY WHO WANTS TO DOWNLOAD THEM, and marketshare means FUCK-ALL.

Same with Google. I don't care what MS produces, because I'll happily ignore it and use something else.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla? No thanks, I'll stick with firefox

One of the most uninsightful posts I've seen modded as "Instightful" in a while.

a. Firefox _is_ Mozilla. As you can read in the titlebar "Mozilla Firefox". The huge thing commonly referred to as "Mozilla" is "Mozilla Seamonkey".

b. It wasn't until 0.8 when Firefox gained some extremely important features that have been in the mainline Mozilla version for ages, as proper UTF-8 form handling (which may not be all that important to English-speaking Americans, but there are other people in the world, too).

c. Modding personal preferences as "Insightful" is, how do I say it, incredibly stupid.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[term8or]

"I think if it was good, integrating an antivirus product into Windows would be damn responsible"
So every microsoft computer in the world would have the same virus checker? Great. That would make the virus writers job so much easier. All you would have to do is break one program...

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[GORby_]

Same with Google. I don't care what MS produces, because I'll happily ignore it and use something else.

Me on the other hand, I'll use the best thing I can find for the job, and at the moment that means google for searching, and mozilla/firefox for browsing, but as soon as a better search engine pops up, I'll start using that one too...

I'm not so much against MS that I won't use their product if it is better (which at the moment, it isn't for what I'm searching for).

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[Chess_the_cat]

Just like Apple had won the PC wars. Just like Wordperfect had won the word processor wars. Just like Nintendo had one the console wars. Wake up. If there's a little box right on my desktop or taskbar that says 'Search here' am I going to launch a browser to get to Google? Not if the 'Search here' box works just as well. It doesn't have to be better. Of course, I have the Google deskbar installed so there is a little 'Search here' box on my taskbar. The thing is will I bother to reinstall it when I buy a new PC and turn off the Windows version? Maybe. Will Joe Sixpack? Nope.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[MHleads]

10 billion? With a b, billion?

You have a short memory, pal. Few years back, they spent half a billion on Hotmail. Now, there are zillions of Hotmail on internet. There won't be even a dozen Google down the line.

Secondly, Hotmail was easily replicable. Google is not. 10 billion is still less!!!

Why on Earth would Microsoft spend half of their money on a search engine?

You are an engineer, right? ;-)

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[uchian]

Netscape also fucked around with browser implementation standards - it wasn't until Mozilla that standards compliance started being taken seriously.

Four years ago when I started uni, I really tried to like Netscape, but the name Nutscrape was appropriate - Netscape 4 was incredibly buggy and crash-prone. That is one of the reasons that Mozilla was a complete rewrite with a new core, don't forget :-)

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[mrogers]

There's really no comparison between the browser wars and the "search engine wars". The barrier for switching browsers was high: you had to download and install Netscape, which not all users were in a position to do because of skills, bandwidth or permission; then as Netscape started to lose ground the number of IE-specific sites increased, raising the barrier even further.

The barrier to switching search engines is basically the length of the search engine's name, because all you have to do is type a different name in the address bar. It doesn't matter how many clueless newbies use Microsoft's built-in search engine: Google will still be a maximum of ten keystrokes away on any PC. And unlike Netscape, it will still be able to access the entire web.

MSN is already the default search engine on Windows, and a lot of poor suckers are probably using it every day without realising that Google exists, but that doesn't affect my ability to use Google from any PC, so why should I care?

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[ski2die]

"Why on Earth would Microsoft spend half of their money on a search engine?"

You underestimate the power of the dark side. According to their mrq financials, MSFT has $59.7 billion in cash, so $10 billion would only be 1/6.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[drx]

When web site developers foolishly started using these proprietary tags, web site viewers realized that half the sites they were going to didn't work "properly" in Netscape, and Netscape lost marketshare.

MS was so clever to include all the "proprietary tags" of Netscape into their browser and added some more. (Except blink.) -- Strange how fast all this is forgotten.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[Mordes]

internet "exploder" it packs a hell of a lot of blue screens into just one little app. also I think that google has the name advantage for now... a mircosoft clone of it would have to be called moogle or something silly like that.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[BuckaBooBob]

I think you completely missed out on everything that actually happened with the antitrust Microsoft lost(But really won when you look at the "Penalty")... It sum it up.. You are partly right... By version 4.0 They were comparable products.. As to which is better.. Thats moot in my view.. Its like arguing If Ford/Chev/Dodge is better.. Its a moot point.What it really comes down to is preference...

Microsoft won for a few factors... #1 is convince (Their product was "Free" and Netscape wasn't). Microsoft used their predatory licensing to Prevent computer manufacturers from pre installing Netscape at all.. (Threats of Yanking their licensing to pre install windows was used therefore putting them at a huge disadvantage compared to PC manufacturers that can pre install windows).. Still on this topic of convince.. when you have a product sitting on your desktop that is "Free" to you and there is a competing product that may or may not be "Better" your at least going to give your freebie a try...

People can argue and argue but it boils down to IE had a unequal footing to Netscape for it to achieve market saturation it did in the time frame it did.. if IE had to stand on the same ground Netscape did the story would be alot different...

Microsoft also was making patches to the windows OS that caused Netscape to become unstable and crash alot... This is a point thats been highly debated and I am not sure of the actual outcome of this point... I can seem to find the document that listed all of MS's actions that the DOJ found MS guilty of... so I am not sure if that was one that made it through...

But your sadly misinformed if you think IE won out over Netscape solely on the fact it was a better browser... There are a vast number of elements that contributed IE's domination in the browser wars...

I am not trying to start a flame war but your comment completely skirted Issues without any mention of factors that lead to IE's domination in the browser wars (Setting Side personal opinions of what browser is better).

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[BuckaBooBob]

You forgot to mention the Demention of Java to use propritary windows API calls aswell.. as Netscape used SUN's Java implimentation which was incompatible with IE.. Thats why IE was forced to Drop all mention of Java in their browser..

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[FurryFeet]

Sayin something is "reasonably free" is like saying your girlfriend is "just a little pregnant".
Freedom, like pregnancy, is digital, not analog.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[Frizzle Fry]

IE wasn't better. Microsoft included their own tags and "VB script" that would make it's browser do things that Netscape couldn't.

Funny, I would consider doing things that your competitors can't to be one of the qualifications for being "better".

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[AndreyF]

"If Google really was offered $10 billion by Microsoft and turned it down, then they were stupid."

Not at all: the two google IPO estimates I've seen are $12b and $15b.

Re:Microsoft versus Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Woah there!

I think it may be the case that those 50% were 'early adopters' of technology, and were a bit more tech savy, and hence sought out better technology.

Once the unwashed masses got their hands on it, IE was good enough to not make them look elsewhere. Look at Opera - it's definitely a better browser than IE, but they're not winning the 'browser wars'.

It's a search engine, not a museum.

[LostCluster]

The beauty of the present Google interface is that it contains absolutely nothing unneeded, and the search box is the main focus of the page.

All four of the artists that came up with proposals for Google redisigns totally missed that concept. One wants Google to provide needless information nobody asked for, one wants to remind people of conspiracy theories on every visit, one's trying to bring color onto a page that you don't usually spend time admiring, and one's suggesting brand extentions that'd end up cheapening the original Google brand.

Google's power is in its function. Needless art on the homepage just distracts from that... There's a reason why artists are only allowed to work with the Google Doodle on rare occasions and they're not welcome to mess with the rest of the home page.

Re:It's a search engine, not a museum.

[g00z]

I have to agree. It's a real shame that I do too, because Joshua Davis is one hell of an interface expert. He's done some real cutting edge interfaces of at praystation.com in the past. But I suppose even a genius can't improve on something that is virtualy perfect to begin with.

The only way I could possibly think of making google any better would be to get rid of that stupid googlebar advertisment they've been sticking on the front page. Just an input box and search results, thank you so much.

Re:It's a search engine, not a museum.

[MisanthropicProggram]

Yes, exactly. I would use the current Google interface as a marketing model to all PHBs.
Here's a service that offers what customers want. period. There's no need to add bullshit or anything else that would increase costs and subsequently prices. You don't need a Google cam, email, calendar, masterbation tracker, or whatever ...the service as is ... is perfect for the marketplace. Leave it alone!
The Cell phone people need to hear this ... that's another post ....

Re:It's a search engine, not a museum.

[td]

Probably Wired asked a dozen designers to improve google, eight said "What? It's perfect already!" and the other four made it into the article.

Re:It's a search engine, not a museum.

[SnappleMaster]

Absolutely. It's great hit a search page that loads in the blink of an eye reliably. It's a nice touch that for holidays and what-not they dress up the google image just a little bit.

If they add more useless crap to www.google.com I will be very disappointed in them!

Re:It's a search engine, not a museum.

[jkleid]

"The only way I could possibly think of making google any better would be to get rid of that stupid googlebar advertisment they've been sticking on the front page. Just an input box and search results, thank you so much."

Well that's exactly what you get when you install googlebar: An input box, and nothing else.

Re:It's a search engine, not a museum.

[Anonymous Coward]

Much of the reason for my using Google is that its home page is simple, it loads quickly, and it is just so easy to *search*, which is what a search engine should be. Yahoo failed when it became a "portal" and tried to do too much by itself. If they could somehow reduce the size of Yahoo's page down to that of Google (that would mean getting rid of those ads, guys) then maybe I'd consider trying it.

Re:It's a search engine, not a museum.

[Dukael_Mikakis]

I agree, mostly, but I'm an engineer as you (probably?) are. We see the practicality and functionality of google for what it is, and don't need the bells and whistles and all those other things that might make it "cool". But we (as engineers) might prefer a Unix command prompt over a flashier Windows GUI, but then Windows happens to be the present dominant OS out there.

Obviously google has become a huge success and that success is most likely due to it's performance (results and speed, fraud-busting, etc.), but I'm not sure how the "general populace" would feel about any visual enhancements or additional features. Perhaps the average user might be intimidated by all sorts of other bizarre features, or maybe they would appreciate them because (as the author Michael Chabon said) they'd get the opportunity to catch new links to potentially interesting information (or maybe the map might save them a trip to mapquest, or something).

I think google is fine and I use it and everything, but I did think the map feature was interesting (of course, not for a standard search, but perhaps as a special search). I'm sure that there are some other features that would be popular with the computer users who aren't all business either.

I mean, there's a reason why so many people go to huge portals like cruel.com or joke sites like the Spark, because they're looking for a distraction, and some of these "enhancements" would provide just that.

Re:It's a search engine, not a museum.

[epsalon]

What googlebar advertisment???

Re:It's a search engine, not a museum.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said.

Re:It's a search engine, not a museum.

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

hahaha, think about the kind of public google has!!
I Think a masturbation tracker would be a big success .... An even bigger success would be to put one on slashdot, your user page would show your carma and liters/week ;), you could also filter comments with this ... for example:

Anonymous Coward Bonus: -1
Gets more than 3 a day: -1

Re:It's a search engine, not a museum.

[petecarlson]

I don't get one either and google is my homepage...

Re:It's a search engine, not a museum.

[petecarlson]

Real men use Lynx.

Google

Web Images Groups Directory News

__________________________________________________ _____
Google Search I'm Feeling Lucky

Re:It's a search engine, not a museum.

[Moofie]

I'm an engineer, and I think MacOS X is teh roolz.

Good engineering means good understanding of human factors. That's one reason that there are very, very, very few good software engineers.

Re:It's a search engine, not a museum.

[You're All Wrong]

AMEN!

YAW.

Re:It's a search engine, not a museum.

[Jonah Hex]

While I agree that the redesigns sucked, I also think Google is missing out by not making use of CSS for different, user preference looks. I've always been a frames and tables kinda guy for my little websites, but for my Hexagon Computers redesign I'm learning CSS and I'm very pleased with how easy it makes seperating content style from the content itself. I like this little scenario

Your best client, Harvey, calls. "Joe", he says, "Our new marketing guy says that the web site needs to be fluid... it needs to expand and contract when people resize their window. Can you have it done by next Tuesday?"

"Er, uh, sure", you stammer. You hang up the phone, curl into a fetal position, and you want to die... on Monday. There are 283 pages and each one contains a fixed-width table. If it takes five minutes to edit each page, it'll take TWENTY-THREE hours to edit them all.

You can prevent this from ever happening to you again if you use CSS to control your tables.

Remember also you can select different CSS sheets on the fly via browser and setup user prefs via cookie or whatever. So there could be many choices for interface, and while I'm sure the cleaner, less cluttered designs will be used a great deal, alot of folks are going to want customization from mild to wild... So for myself I'm going for pure CSS menus and layouts.

Jonah Hex

Re:It's a search engine, not a museum.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised nobody has stated the obvious yet -- the design of google's front page is cost effective in terms of bandwidth. Imagine one of those big designs with all the flashy features and images. They'd be pumping out ~100KB of data each time someone loads their homepage, which would be a huge waste of their bandwidth.

Their current homepage html is ~2.5KB, and their logo image is ~8.5KB. They obviously want to spend their bandwidth on providing search results, not serving useless designs!

Re:It's a search engine, not a museum.

[renderhead]

You may think you're joking, but according to the article, famed graphic designer and author of Envisioning Information Edward Tufte said just that. Of course, they buried his reply in the Googlemaniacs section of the article instead of putting it on the redesigns page.

Googlemania

[jargoone]

First things first, google: Change your technology to get rid of all those fucking domains-with-all-the-words-youre-looking-for-or-il l-find-another-search-engine.

Re:Googlemania

[tronicum]

Beside Domains Google-Spam (pages filled up with pseudo text and keywords) is a lot more worse than the need to change the interface.
All that companys that use stupid scripts to generate content should be detected by google and removed.

I wonder why they did not find an algorythm/AI-logic that detect such link-farms.

Re:Googlemania

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like this?

Re:Googlemania

[thedillybar]

Agreed, but once they fix this, googlers will come up with another way to crawl up on the list (no pun intended). At least the domains-with-all-the-words can easily be found and ignored.

Google seems to have a strict policy on altering results provided by the algorithm, which I think is a wonderful policy and shouldn't be changed without much consideration.

Interesting Redesigns

[Acidic_Diarrhea]

I'm not impressed by the interface redesigns. Part of the reason why I like google is that it isn't cluttered with useless information. There's an input field and the ability to submit my query. That's all I need from google. The artists who offered their ideas for a redesign seem to have made cluttered screens that, may be nice to look at, would introduce longer waiting times - and really, when I use google, I'm not going to google.com in order to see google, I'm going to see the pages that are of interest to me from my search query.

Re:Interesting Redesigns

[globalar]

The thing is, when you get popular and you start thinking about your public image, image can become very important. Redesigns attract people - plain and simple (and "old") less so. When you want hype about your company and you want that kind of attention, you do silly things like make a new sign or logo. Cosmetics/aesthetics sell most crowds. And Google is looking to sell soon (and big).

Form should follow function though, I agree.

Re:Interesting Redesigns

[JPriest]

If it's not broke...

Re:Interesting Redesigns

[JoeNotCharles]

I thought it was pretty obvious the "redesigns" were all intended as jokes. Nobody could possible take the first two seriously coming from a company with Google's track record, and the third looked like a parody of what it might look like post-IPO. It looked more like, after the first two pointed out how horrible Google *could* be (don't you all know sites that look just like those?), the third artist showed a more reasonable step backward that might happen if the design firms got their hands on it.

And then there's the Google Button... brilliant idea, if done right (and I have no idea where to start doing it right). In this case it's the cartoons that are the joke, not the concept.

I mean, come on. How can you read that last panel and take the rest of it seriously? It works too well as a punchline!

Re:Interesting Redesigns

[meme_police]

With a redesign I would stop using Google. It's already bad enough with all the pagerank spammers but a redesign would be the straw for me.

Re:Ah, yes, google-bombs

[greentree]

and also weapons of mass destruction

Re:Ah, yes, google-bombs

[Anonymous Coward]

See also:

weapons of mass destruction
french military victories

Googlemania: The Class

[ctrl-alt-elite]

They forgot the class currently being taught at the University of Washington (which I am taking at the moment). It looks at Google from a wide variety of standpoints-- including looking at Google as a 'Ravager of Worlds'-- and is definitely a nice departure from the traditional "learn how to Google stuff" class.

Re:Googlemania: The Class

[Deraj DeZine]

Here's hoping that's a lab class.

Ok, today, your instructions are to perform at least 15 searches on Google for anything you want. You must then write a report on how the results appeared biased/skewed. Please do not search for such a report using Google. Any student caught using MSN or Yahoo will be failed on the spot.

Big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly, thanks to Google, I am not the man I was seven days ago - John Gaeta

I say that after reading /. everyday.

Re:Ah, yes, google-bombs

[LostCluster]

The "french military victories" googlebomb page that looks like it's from Google now has something that totally ruins the illusion... a huge popup ad.

Re:Ah, yes, google-bombs

[greentree]

er, i mean weapons of mass destruction

I, for one...

[Deraj DeZine]

I, for one, welcome our ...reigning... Google overlords.

Good story

[Atticu5]

I think it's a very intelligent collection of articles -- I mean, with gems like this one, how could you go wrong?

"The number Google is finite, but it's so large that it is infinite for all practical purposes."

Seriously, it's quite good. Go RTFA.

Re:Good story

[Megaslow]

Yeah... Too bad there is no such thing as the number Google.

There is, however, the number googol, which may be "infinite for all practical purposes", but, come on, this is Slashdot.

Without the googol, you couldn't have the googolplex, and without the googolplex you couldn't have things like this

Re:Good story

[Anonymous Coward]

A googol is big, but objects of that size do show up in science.

For example, the size of the cosmological constant which is predicted by particle physics is larger than the actually observed amout of dark energy by a factor of about 10^120.

But a googolplex... damn, that's big.

What?

[savagedome]

Google has improved my sex life, tightened my abs, and brought me closer to God.
- Lloyd Grove

Any other Google out there that I am not aware of?

Re:What?

[cfuse]

Any other Google out there that I am not aware of?

No, but you can get mind altering substances on the original that will make you think that you are a buff love god for jesus.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

buff love god for jesus

Jesus is... gay?

All I have to say

[gblues]

Google needs an interface redesign like fish need a bicycle.

Nathan

Re:All I have to say

[Anonymous Coward]

well said. after looking at the wired page, i noticed they also have pictures of the designers of those "concept pages", which of course are all butt ugly. do we really need to see their faces? are they really THAT skillful? did it really require great emotional and psychological output to produce those conceptual google interfaces? do we care about their personal commentary? i'd say no, no, no, and no.

Re:All I have to say

[irhtfp]

Google needs an interface redesign like fish need a bicycle.

Way to turn a poorly worded cliche into a +5 Insightful post.

My little red karma whore purse is off to you. :]

Re:All I have to say

[CKW]

Oh, I don't know. This guy seems to be making good use of his:

"Fish using a bicycle"

All four proposed redesigns are lame!

[Eric Smith]

They don't provide anything of value, but they make it look more cluttered. The genius of the current interface is its simplicity.

The geographic location stuff might be of marginal utility occasionally, but I'd just want an extra link to click on near the result if I wanted that info.

Re:All four proposed redesigns are lame!

[LesPaul75]

Agreed.

And I love the way that "Jenny Holzer" would redesign the page... I'm sure Google would be excited about expressing her personal political views right on the front page. How did that mess even make it into the Wired article?

I think that the main page should have a Flash game where you get to hit republicans on the head with a big hammer. I think that users would really like that.
-- Jenny Holzer, "Artist"

Ha.

Re:All four proposed redesigns are lame!

[cujo_1111]

I agree...

Design 1: Way too cluttered to be useful. I like the colour scheme and style. Maybe they could take the original and apply the style. Score 2.5/5

Design 2: Why the f*ck do you want to see conspiracy theories when you are looking for recipes or tv show details? Anyway, all she did was cut and paste a declassified document onto the current page. Score: 0/5

Design 3: This actually looks decent, although I really don't see the reason for putting a typewriter and some design that looks as if it was taken from a $50 note has to do with searching. The colours are good, not too graphically taxing (will have to lose the typewriter and money design, of course). Score: 2/5

Current Design: Simplicity plus. I cannot find any fault with the design. Score: 5/5

Google button idea... Score: N/A

Re:All four proposed redesigns are lame!

[Anonymous Coward]

No idea why it made it into the Wired article, but it's obviously a joke. Don't take it so seriously.

Re:All four proposed redesigns are lame!

[sfjoe]

And I love the way that "Jenny Holzer" would redesign the page... I'm sure Google would be excited about expressing her personal political views right on the front page

It's actually a very good idea for the post-IPO Google. Alternate Jenny's idea with its opposite number: Republicans get a Flash game where they get to beat up homosexuals, liberals and non-Christians. The resulting controversy gets mentioned in every news story for several days. Traffic spikes and investors bid up the stock price. Of course, it has nothing to do with search results but that's business.

Re:All four proposed redesigns are lame!

[Anonymous Coward]

No thanks. I prefer the game where flame-baiters such as yourself make stupid comments and I mod them down.

Play again?

Re:All four proposed redesigns are lame!

[awtbfb]

Jenny Holzer, "Artist"

Actually, Jenny Holzer is an excellent artist, regardless of your/her political leaning. Most people don't get the full effect of her work since her installations typically don't photograph well. Speaking from experience, her work is really quite powerful in person.

Of course, the most famous phrase she has used in her work is appropriate to mention here: "Protect Me from What I Want" (for bonus points, note the location of the sign).

Re:All four proposed redesigns are lame!

[jfengel]

I would have to look into her work more deeply to put it into context, but I found her answer to this question insulting. Politics aside, she was asked a serious and important question, and she responded with a bit of propaganda having essentially nothing to do with the question.

I can't imagine why even Wired would run the response, except for the general concept among some artists that "if you can't outthink, outrage." I'm an artist myself and I hate when others in my field make it difficult for people to take me seriously.

Re:All four proposed redesigns are lame!

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed.

Are we seeing a pattern here?

[NanoGator]

Are we going to see Google balloon up to what Altavista used to look like, then to fight a competitor slim back down to what Google (and Altavista) is like now? Then have it balloon back up as new stuff comes along?

Just curious. It reminds me of a management cycle that Scott Adams wrote about once. "We need to decentralize to be more efficient!" Then, a few months later "We need to centralize in order to focus on our coure strengths". Then, repeat. heh.

Re:Are we seeing a pattern here?

[UrgleHoth]

That which is static is dead.
Change IS required to stay alive.
The trick is to find that "sweet spot" rate of change.
Too slow, you become irrelevant.
Too fast, something jams up or breaks apart and you wreck.

Re:Ah, yes, google-bombs

[setzman]

The "french military victories" googlebomb page that looks like it's from Google now has something that totally ruins the illusion... a huge popup ad.

What pop-up ad? I use FireFox and block many ad servers in my "hosts" file.

im not impressed

[highwaytohell]

with the redesigns. All that needless clutter. Reminds me too much of yahoo. Its why i stopped using yahoo. Googles brilliance is in the simplicity of its interface. Everyone knows that when you go to google you get a search interface. You go there to search for things, not be bombarded with needless advertising that has no relevance to what you initially went there for. I think why it has become such a phenomenon, because it is effective, fast, and is straight to the point. Usually the simplest solutions are the most effective ones...

Re:im not impressed

[Frostalicious]

All that needless clutter. Reminds me too much of yahoo.

Yes but you can't expect artists to NOT draw wild stuff. Fortunately Google realized that this is not a job for an artist, but for an HCI engineer (human computer interaction).

Please read this...

[Futurepower(R)]

Google management: Please read this, and don't change your page designs.

Google vs. Gates

[loomis]

A profound quote from the Google vs. Gates article examining why Microsoft is so obsessed with Google as Longhorn draws nearer:

"Microsoft looks at Google and sees its own past, full of promise."

Care to elaborate on that?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or are you just a karma whore?

They were artists, not search engine designers.

[Geancanach]

What else were they going to do? Of course artists and graphic designers are going to try to make the site pretty. They all missed the point of Google, but so did the people who asked for their opinions.

Dissapointing

[Zevets]

This article was tipicle (sp?) Wired. "YAY, for google, WOOHOOO!", is all the article said. It did not explain how it was going to repell the Microsoft Juggernaut of dotcom doom, and it did not provide any insights into the future of Google, other than that original employees are going to be filthy rich.

Google Mail is an interesting subject, and it did not say anything on how it was going to attract users. MailRank algorithm anyone? If there are 99% accuracy spam filters, ala the recent slashsdot article, Google better have them. They built a better search engine and they came. If they build a better spam filter, even more will come.

Microsoft is providing a fact search thingy in Longhorn. I hope Google has one soon, or else they will not survive. (As a student, I think the fact search thing will be invaluable, and is practically worth buying Longhorn.)

I hope Google can survive, but Microsoft is here, and Bill has not lost. Yet.

Re:Dissapointing

[cptgrudge]

I hope Google can survive, but Microsoft is here, and Bill has not lost. Yet.

True. And there are areas where they have not won. Take the Xbox, for example. They really haven't "won" by any definition of the term, but they haven't lost either. Google may have to put up with an incrementally better search engine every year from Microsoft, but as of yet, I've never been impressed with MSN. Or any of the others for that matter.

When I visit a web site to search, I go to do just that. I don't go to be distracted by any periphery. I get enough information overload during the day as it is. Returning to that uncluttered Google web page when I do a search is like a small breath of fresh air reminding me that there are some things that are still simple.

Re:Dissapointing

[Cosmik]

Typical.

Re:Dissapointing

[Dukael_Mikakis]

I agree completely with your post. I can dig Wired for some "light reading" but I find it far too often panders to the casual techie who is more into what new gadgets they can buy to store phone numbers than what actually goes on inside them. Wired is technology not for the sake of technology (or knowledge, or whatever), but technology to be edgy and cool. Wired glorifies google because they are hip and hot, and vilifies Microsoft (not that I disagree, per se) because Microsoft is stodgy and megalomaniacal. Google is private and still independent, while Microsoft is public and capitalistic.

It will be interesting to see how Google and Microsoft handle the impending collision of egos as Microsoft will inevitably try to capture or dislodge Google.

I use google, but I'm more than a little cautious about their privacy policies. The fact search that you mention would be an amazing enhancement to google, so that I wouldn't have to scour through some dozens of online stores before I can get to some actual information. I hope it comes soon.

As far as my projected future of google, they're going to go public someday (because they will become very very rich), and then they'll turn into every other corporation in America, losing their edge for conservatism and becoming too big for anybody's good (or are they already too big?)

Re:Dissapointing

[ElleyKitten]

If they build a better spam filter, even more will come.

If Hotmail is an indication of their spam technology, we have nothing to worry about.

Re:Dissapointing

[0x0d0a]

Wired's stated goal is to cover culture's interaction with technology. That *is* what they are doing. It isn't really a technical magazine.

True, they tend to take a more human-oriented pop-culture approach that I'd like, but philosophical discussion of the Internet and sociology has a much smaller, less lucrative audience.

I like Wired (though I don't subscribe) because it's generally at least somewhat interesting, because there's a lot of content in each issue, and because it's mainstream enough that a lot of people have it sitting around. If I'm at a dentist's office, I have something interesting to read instead of Parenting or Life.

Re:Dissapointing

[wfberg]

Searched the web for tipicle. Results 1 - 10 of about 406. Search took 0.17 seconds

Did you mean: typical

Superusers?

[TheSpoom]

How does one get to be a Google superuser? Does one get special privileges like banning enemies from Google and altering search returns for certain users? Hmm, maybe I just need to get my search count up...

Re:Superusers?

[squidfood]

How does one get to be a Google superuser?

1. Go to the Google home page.
2. Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right...

Re:Superusers?

[NanoGator]

"2. Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right..."

Heh. That was good.

Re:Superusers?

[Art Tatum]

No no no. You search for "iddqd", "idkfa", and "goobers" sequentially.

Re:Superusers?

[gregeth]

Oh, I know: 1. Go to main page. 2. Type su - 3. ??? 4. You are now a superuser, ENJOY!!

Re:Superusers?

[Loadmaster]

You forgot the B A Start.

Re:Superusers?

[The Jonas]

Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start

Heh, Cheat codes for Contra on Nintendo - missed a week of class in 1990 thanks to that game... Aah, the memories.

Blog spammers for Elron

[AndroidCat]

Lately a few people on alt.religion.scientology have been tracking an increase in cookie-cutter mass-produced pro-$cientology blogs. Could it be that $cientology found that blog comment spamming no longer worked, and are now creating actual throw-away blogs to see if they can gimick the results again?

Re:Blog spammers for Elron

[AndroidCat]

A web site where this is covered. (Sifting through ars takes practice and training. :)

Great Picture, though.

[rholliday]

The redesigns aren't very impressive, but you've got to love this picture, though. :)
The article it's in is mediocre, but that's a gem.

Re:Great Picture, though.

[Dun Malg]

The redesigns aren't very impressive, but you've got to love this picture, though. :)

I looked at that picture and I imagined that, instead of bringing up a Google search, it summons a Goon squad to beat the crap out of that student.

Amen

[MisanthropicProggram]

'nuff said.

Can Google ever IPO?

[LostCluster]

I fear that the Google IPO, if the ever get around to it, will mean the end of Google as we know it.

Right now, the owners of Google seem content with the profit that their company is making, and are not efforting to squeeze every possible penny out of their site. The Google homepage has to be the most seen single page on the Internet, yet they have refrained from putting a banner ad on it.

A public company doesn't have that luxury. It has a fiduciary responsibility to make as much money as posible for the sake of its minority shareholders. They'll feel pressure to put ads where there were no ads before, and to curtail research projects that aren't going anywhere profitable in the near future.

In short, could the IPO kill Google-as-we-know-it?

Re:Can Google ever IPO?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed you are insightful and I believe this is one of the two main reasons they are hesitating.

The other reason was that SCO made some grumblings a while back about suing them for their linux use. Not that SCO would win, just that SCO knows that they could ruin the IPO by launching a lawsuit at the same time as the IPO.

Why IPO if they don't HAVE to? Look forward to an IPO in the future when SCO v IBM is settled and they have gone over their doubts about money vs legacy. Probably in a year or more.

Re:Can Google ever IPO?

[bagsc]

I'm afraid too.
In the '80s, lots of businessmen talk about American enterprise losing its soul. Levereged buyouts started taking over the 'socially responsible' companies, hacking them apart, selling the new soulless company (now with n% more profit!), and making a tidy profit. Since then, being a public company means you need to watch your stock price. When to take the chance to forward a social agenda or pull your punches, you may end up on the wrong side of a hostile takeover.

Re:Can Google ever IPO?

[Anonymous Coward]

A public company doesn't have that luxury.

Before an IPO, the management of a private company has a responsibility to maximize the value of the stock.

After an IPO, the management of a public company has a responsibility to maximize the value of the stock.

Re:Can Google ever IPO?

[wfberg]

Before an IPO, the management of a private company has a responsibility to maximize the value of the stock.

After an IPO, the management of a public company has a responsibility to maximize the value of the stock.

And you can only be sued by your stockholders if you don't.

If you're in charge of a private company, it's easy to get your stockholders to agree on a course that doesn't maximize the value of the stock. Just call 'em up and say "Hey Bob, we thought it would be nice to do X, even though that won't maximize our stock's value".

If you're a public company, you're publicly traded, and every Schmoe you don't even know with a few certificates of your stock can sue your ass for not grasping at every opportunity for making a buck (such as outsourcing to sweatshops, if you're Nike).

Also, private investors tend to be in it for the long term; they know that you need money to make money, which is why they sunk a butt-load of investments into your enterprise in the first place - that's gambling money, pure and simple. People who trade on the open market usually have much shorter term views, even for IPOs.

You Fail It

[alan_dershowitz]

Part of graphic design is designing for your audience. I don't know a single person who looked at Google and said "this needs more gaudy shit." These guys totally failed.

I suppose it's inevitable. It's hard to justify your design competence to the average joe or PHB with less rather than more. I'm sure a lot of people if questioned would look at Google right now and think "anybody could design that."

Thank god artists don't design our web interfaces

[s88]

Look at the crap these guys put together.

First off, the first guy's "idea" is nothing but a rip-off of this contest winning idea.

The others are nothing but blatant political posturing.

Scott

I like Google gfx

[curious.corn]

because it's simple. The logo looks like some incredibly gifted code geek tried to liven up his/her backend logic with some photoshopping but... failed; it looks cheapish but it gives that "we're not in marketing" feeling. Also, it's very blank, like Structure, where Morpheus lectures Neo before running the training programs... cool. Loading google produces s a feeling of loss, a blank page, one measly textarea and a button (no 'submit' caption!)... the web staring blankly at you, wondering what the hell you want...
The linked stuff is just gfx artists masturbation; looks cool, but they're just exacerbating the business they're trained in.

It's kind of funny...

[TWX]

None of the page redesigners proposed this:


Google

_________________________________
Google Search / I'm Feeling Lucky


I mean, we could lighten the interface from graphics so that it loads quickly...

Re:It's kind of funny...

[NanoGator]

"I mean, we could lighten the interface from graphics so that it loads quickly..."

You could always use Opera and just turn graphics off. I did that on a crappy dialup connection once. Without graphics, the net behaves almost like it does with broadband.

Re:It's kind of funny...

[swedub]

I totally agree. As a web designer myself, I am surprised how none of the "redo's" had any care for optimization. The main reason I prefer Google is it's extreme simplicity, quickness and ease of use, especially when viewing their site through my Treo 300. One seemed filled with way too much information for one page, one seemed to have nothing to do with what people are using Google for, one seemed t would be a huge download with all the graphics and one, of course, wasn't a site redesign at all. I prefer the current approach, K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid).

Re:It's kind of funny...

[smellystudent]

www.google.com/palm

Alright, so there's a very crappy looking 1.2kb logo instead of Google, but it's close.

Re:It's kind of funny...

[Zak3056]

Google's Palm Version already looks like the above.

Re:It's kind of funny...

[aardwolf204]

Or you could just make your own interface, whats to stop you. I've made a quick little WML page for my phone that just shows a text input field and a go button that searches the google.com/palm site. sure, it doesnt say google at the top and (c) 2004 at the bottom but thats the best part.

Re:Ah, yes, google-bombs

[Anonymous Coward]

The "french military victories" googlebomb page that looks like it's from Google now has something that totally ruins the illusion... a huge popup ad.

Holy Jebus, man... get a 21st century browser already...

Google is more than just Google

[YouHaveSnail]

The most interesting thing about a good search engine is that for most folks, it's their front end to the Internet. Like your browser or your computer monitor, it's the window through which you see the digital world. For that reason, people tend to give it credit for all the content on the net that they wouldn't have known about otherwise. I think this is particularly true for Google because it's so comprehensive, so fast, so flexible, so easy to use.

So in some sense, Google in many people's minds is more than just the search engine. People think of Google almost the way they think of the Internet itself. People don't say "...you can search the net for that...", they say "...you can Google for that...".

Google is where AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and many others want to be. And it's (so far) conducting itself with grace, intelligence, integrity, and style. I wish it well.

IPO not necessarily delayed

[bmarklein]

The IPO is not necessarily delayed. The CEO's statements that were taken to mean there was a delay were actually consistent with his previous statements. Google has never publicly stated that they would be doing an IPO.

Re:Ah, yes, google-bombs

[donscarletti]

Ah, evidently the albinoblacksheep guys have never heard of the battle of Austerlitz, the battle of the Pyrimids or the battle of Verdun (I use victory in a loose sence).

P.s. I am not French.

New Google trick!!!

[BTWR]

Search for "Google Backwards" and hit "I'm feeling lucky" - very cool (sorry if this is "so last week," but I just found it myself yesterday...)

Re:New Google trick!!!

[RatBastard]

HAHAHAHA! That's great!

Re:New Google trick!!!

[edalytical]

This screams practical joke.

Re:New Google trick!!!

[belloc]

Sorry if this is "so last week

Actually, apparently it's so 18 months ago. The site FAQ shows that it was featured on Slashdot on Sept 8, 2002 and (in true Slashdot dupe tradition) Sept 12, 2002).

Belloc

Re:New Google trick!!!

[notamac]

Yep... if I remember correctly it was so that people in countries which censored search engines could get to google by tricking them into thinking that they were going to a page other than google.

Re:New Google trick!!!

[goldmeer]

On a whim, I decided to do a "Google Backwards" search on "Microsoft" and clicked "ykcuL gnileeF m'I" and was quite amused by the results...

Google Worshipers

[B2K3]

There is a "Google Worshipers" group on Orkut.

Join and embrace your inner Google!

*my* google interface

[embedded_C]

My google interface is on my locally stored homepage, and is displayed as a simple white text box with the word Google beside it. The form itself then links to http://www.google.com/search, so I don't even have any idea what Google's homepage looks like. Plus I have quick links to all my regular webpages/portals/groups etc...

So if you want a new google interface, design one and access it on your local drive.

Re:*my* google interface

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for posting that like to Google--I don't know how I would have found it otherwise!

Re:*my* google interface

[1u3hr]

Mostly I use the Search box in Opera's toolbar. It defaults to Google, but there are a dozen others (AlltheWeb, etc). But I do go to the homepage when I need to do an "advanced" search.

Re:*my* google interface

[riflemann]

And mine is even simpler. Use the Mozilla keywords feature, and all you have to do is to enter 'g ' in the location bar and you have your results. Saves loading a whole page.

See how to do it.

Re:*my* google interface

[Anonymous Coward]

heh...that's EXACTLY what I do as well....

Those designers are clueless

[rdean400]

These designers should be fired for failing to clue in to how Google got so big in the first place: it indexes a lot of pages, and it's search page comes up FAST. None of the proposed redesigns would make Google easier to use...they'd just make it take longer to download the search page.

Exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone go tell Joshua that portals suck!

I want to search for something, not an update on the universe everytime I login.

A "My Mom" story

[Atario]

My mom, for a long time, didn't realize you could (or maybe just never bothered to) type an URL directly into the browser; she would always put the main component of the name into a search (being that she was on MSN, that search was always MSN Search). It was kinda hit-or-miss, but she still did it. Most of the time, on Google, this will work fine (even better if you use the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button) -- leading me to believe there are far more people out there as you describe than we may realize.

How to screw up a great, usable interface

[dmiller]

Just give it to a graphic designer.

The ones listed in the story were appalling.

Web standards and structural markup.

[Jerk City Troll]

On the matter of choosing a UI design for Google, it is of course just downright stupid to build any appearance into a website. The markup should be standards compliant and structural. Websites should obviously provide a default set of stylesheets and images, but the user should be able to apply any stylesheet they want. In the world envisioned by the W3C, there's nothing stopping you from applying any appearance you want to the web, rather than the other way around.

Artist or "artist" ?

[JonTurner]

-- Jenny Holzer, "Artist"

I can't remember, so help me out here, people: is "artist" (with quote marks) what you get to call yourself when you waste four years at college on an Art History degree and end up thoroughly unemployed (see also "artsy-fartsy") or is "artist" just an all-purpose label for unattractive whiners who spoil every opportunity to do something meaningful by calling lame political commentary "art" (with quotes) thereby ensuring that the product of one's life is measured in the number of coffee refills served while working at the doughnut shop rather than creating something of beauty or meaning?

I can never remember which is which, but then again it's a fine distinction.

Re:Artist or "artist" ?

[isaac]

I can't remember, so help me out here, people: is "artist" (with quote marks) what you get to call yourself when you waste four years at college on an Art History degree and end up thoroughly unemployed (see also "artsy-fartsy") or is "artist" just an all-purpose label for unattractive whiners who spoil every opportunity to do something meaningful by calling lame political commentary "art" (with quotes) thereby ensuring that the product of one's life is measured in the number of coffee refills served while working at the doughnut shop rather than creating something of beauty or meaning?

Jenny Holzer seems to be doing pretty well for herself; hardly unemployed or pushing doughnuts. I recommend you look her up.

Personally, I like her art. But then, I have a sense of humor.

-Isaac

oh wow, dotslash.com is Japanese bondage!

[qewl]

Wait a minute, I think that's Christina Aguilera.. on a Japanese site. Wow, she's all over the place.

Would that be...

[el-spectre]

WankRank?

Re:Would that be...

[el-spectre]

Or SpankRank?

Blog Spammers

[caseih]

Hmm. Sounds like that guy who keeps mosting the link to sco's web site. The solution is to give the googlebot a slashdot account and browse at +2!

Yes they all sucked....

[Phil John]

....but I liked the infinity motif, that was a really nice little touch, make people guess a bit and then hit on it.

Quickly, Avert Your Eyes!

[qortra]

Wrong. IE 4+ didn't crash when you looked at it the wrong way.

Wrong. Many variants of IE 4 and 5 were AMAZINGLY unstable. I remember being brought to tears by the mind-numbingly frequent crashes of IE on my otherwise-stable computer. It really wasn't until a few service packs into 5 that they started to get their act together.

Just a remark about infinity...

[rmdyer]

One of those artists said...

"The number Google is finite, but it's so large that it is infinite for all practical purposes."

Even a Googleplex is as far away from infinity as is the number 1. Few people really get infinity...even artists. Practical purposes maybe, but close to infinity? Infinity isn't a number at all. It is a symbol for continuousness.

+1

Re:Just a remark about infinity...

[1arkhaine]

But he said for practical purposes, therefore implying that for impractical purposes, the number google was useless.

I don't understand the nitpick here?

Re:Just a remark about infinity...

[beeplet]

Perhaps you mean the numbers "googol" and "googolplex"?

And anyway, the quote doesn't say the number Google [sic] is "close to infinity", just that it's >> than most numbers one encounters in real life, thus "infinite for all practical purposes".

Re:Just a remark about infinity...

[rokzy]

someone who doesn't understand infinity talking about people not understanding infinity. I'd call it ironic, but I have a much better word for it...

retardedness!

Re:Just a remark about infinity...

[0x0d0a]

Please feel free to give an example of a practical day-to-day use where you would use "a googol" and need to mean the precise numerical value.

I personally think that the artist understood what he was saying pretty well. Two two are different, but the common use of the term infinity means "a lot", just like the common (if rare) use of "a googol".

Re:Just a remark about infinity...

[hawkfish]

Infinity isn't a number at all. It is a symbol for continuousness.

Um, no. Infinity is a catchall name for the transfinite cardinals, and at least one of them (aleph-null) is smaller than the cardinality of the real numbers (c). The latter is sometimes called "the power of the continuum" because it captures our notion of continuousness.

Shepard Fairey

[Rick and Roll]

I really like the site makeover design by Shepard Fairey. I think that Google should hire an artist. Their site could be so much cooler.

Re:Shepard Fairey

[0x0d0a]

Why be "cool"?

Google doesn't need to try to play off of visual novelty, because they've taken an approach of trying to produce the best product possible.

You know what *is* cool -- the features that they add constantly. They don't make any fuss about them, don't add a new little badge to indicate that you can do reverse phone lookups on the main page, or anything. They just let it work, and let you be pleased and surprised when you try searching and things Just Work.

I hope that whoever is responsible for the rabidly spartan design at Google never retires or otherwise leaves. He's done an incredible amount to help the company.

Besides...your worry is a distinct visual look? I know many web sites loaded down with Flash, tons of faux-3d bitmaps, and rollover menus with more fake 3d stuff. I can't think of any other major site that looks like Google. Simplicity is Google's trademark.

Re:Shepard Fairey

[Rick and Roll]

Hmm, I had no idea that they supported reverse phone lookups. Maybe if they featured it a bit more prominently it would.

My point is that Google has enough money, it's about time they get a REAL web designer.

Big mistake

[symbolic]

hypothetical interface redesigns by a group of artists and graphic designers.

All one has to do is look at all the relatively useless flash-driven drivel on the web, and realize that artists and graphic designers are not all acquainted with the notion of usability. The one thing I truly like about google is its VERY functional simplicity.

Re:Big mistake

[silentbozo]

All one has to do is look at all the relatively useless flash-driven drivel on the web, and realize that artists and graphic designers are not all acquainted with the notion of usability.

Agreed. I think this is a case of everything looking like nails when the only tool (or mindset) you have is a hammer. Graphic designers are used to controlling EVERYTHING about presentation - hence their fatalistic fascination with flash, which allows them to rob the end user of any control over presentation (ie, font size, colors, page width, etc.) Problem is, HTML is by design, meant to be interpreted by the browser - whether it be lynx, a PDA browser, explorer, mozilla, webtv, etc.

The other issue is that HTML is meant as a text markup language. This isn't fixed text, but living, flowing text, that can be wrapped at unpredictable places, set in any font style and size, viewed at 512 x 384 or 1600 x 1200, and the leaner the underlying code is, the faster it transmits and loads.

"It raises my perceived IQ by at least 20 points."

[Anonymous Coward]

"Google rocks. It raises my perceived IQ by at least 20 points. I can pull a reference or quote in seconds, and I can figure out who I'm talking to and what they're known for - a key feature for those of us who are name-memory challenged."
- Wes Boyd, president, MoveOn.org

Well, that bumps it up to 40. Congratulations!

user experience design is supposed to be practical

[SideshowBob]

I agree, mostly, but I'm an engineer as you (probably?) are. We see the practicality and functionality of google for what it is, and don't need the bells and whistles and all those other things that might make it "cool".

Actually, good user experience design is supposed to place practicality above bells and whistles. The problem is that so many UE experts are really designer/artists and not really UE experts.

Having said that, engineers aren't usually the best UE designers either, because what is practical to an engineer is often inscrutable to a normal user. Imagine a color chooser box that took hex values for R G and B color components. Very handy for a developer but awful for a user. You see bad design all the time from engineers *and* (graphic) designers.

Usewhat?

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

"I can't imagine life without Google News. Thousands of sources from around the world ensure anyone with an Internet connection can stay informed. The diversity of viewpoints available is staggering."
- Michael Powell, chair, Federal Communications Commission

I Am Against all this "i sue you" thing, sue everyone and eveything you don't like, someone said your name?, HE CAN'T!!, you OWN that word, well, that is just stupid, you can't remove words from a language, and you can't remove ideas, concepts, knowledge from people, it ain't right, and it ain't possible to control. But, i also hate when some asshole with zero experience and zero knowledge have access to some technology he doesn't diserve, because he has to LERN first, to diserve that technology, but now we are in a world in which just for comercial reasons everyone has access to any technology, and that is KILLING it, it's killing our world. Technology is now shit, shit for the masses, no more drugs!, no more hookers, we don't need them anymore, now we have a different brain-killer, TV, Internet, e-whatever.
If you think i am an extremist, please look at this guy giving google credit for the creation of usenet .... use what you said?

Google's minimalism

[justinstreufert]

A lot of people have pointed out how stupid it would be to replace Google's trademark minimalist look with cluttered, busy, or even over-designed pages. I agree, but I want to add something.

I personally use Google for all different kinds of research; work, play, random boredom. If I had to classify my searches I'd probably come up with 100 distinct categories of information I look for weekly. And I'm just one of millions of users from all different backgrounds, all searching in different fields and for different reasons.

In my opinion, one of the reason Google is such an amazing tool for searching all these fields of data is beacuse it is so minimalist. It is unadorned, free of styling and starkly generic. Almost like a page whose CSS style sheet failed to load. Why is this a good thing? It imparts no bias to the research task at hand. You could be looking for monitor parts, anti-malarial drugs or advice on your tax deductions, and your mind is free to focus into the data at hand.

Combined with its DWIM features and fantastic algorithm, I think that the "blank page" look makes Google almost invisible. It's totally transparent, leaving just you and the data. Pretty cool.

OK, I don't think I've ever written a more flaky-sounding paradigmy comment in my life. Forgive me.

Justin

Re:Google's minimalism

[burns210]

The reason I first used, and continued to use google when I first learned of it? I am on dialup, and the Yahoo page tooks many seconds to load while the google page was basicly instant.

Google is a search company. They have a text box in the middle of the page and a brief text menu bar above it... The page is so small, that for all users, impatient and on slow connections, Google is one of the only sites I can use that is nearly instant.

the power of Unix

[CAIMLAS]

Google is damned cool. It's definately the best thing out there right now. However, it could be better.

What is missing is a simple regex interpreter: it would drastically increase the efficiency of searches. Boolean stuff is cool, but it is by no means powerful: we've had boolean searches since, what, 1995, 1996? It's incredibly limited to AND OR NOT logic.

If MS's search engine attempts were to have such regex features, it would likely replace google for many of my features, provided it wasn't overly intrusive (which I doubt as even a remote possibility, actually). Google really needs to get with the times, so to speak.

Re:the power of Unix

[The Z Master]

I'm not so sure. I've thought about this before, and really, what would be a situation where you'd use a regex to search for a document? Most searches are assembled by combining the right words (with boolean AND implied), not letter sequences.

Regex searches could also be slow. Think of how many documents Google has to sift through to look for keywords. Now think about backtracking in word matching. In addition, unless Google implemented some kind of safeguards, someone could use up massive processing time on Google servers.

Re:the power of Unix

[CAIMLAS]

All valid concerns, but certainly something that could be worked around.

Exact-phrase matching is enough, I s'pose. However, I'm continually irritated by irrelivant search results due to there being the same words on the same page, but drastically spaced appart.

Now, let's say I'm looking for something that I'm not sure of specifically, say, a quote from a famous person that I know a couple key phrases of. Let's say the quote is "fuck monkeys, for they don't want to cuddle after sex". I search for, "monkey cuddling sex" and you come up with a bunch of irrelivant sites because you'll have a spammed site with all those words in it - but they're throughout a massive document.

Google should at least have the ability to search for for words within a certain margin, such as "limit scope of search to within 100 words of other search terms" or such, to limit such abuse and increase results.

That alone should be enough to drastically improve results, I'd think.

Re:the power of Unix

[wfberg]

Google should at least have the ability to search for for words within a certain margin, such as "limit scope of search to within 100 words of other search terms" or such, to limit such abuse and increase results.

Altavista was renowned in its day for it's NEAR operator which did this.

Icon

[Jebediah21]

When is there going to be in icon for Search / Google?

Google's Open Source Idea Lab

[K-Man]

Publishing an API is now "open source"?

Re:Disappointing

[Animats]

Yes, one does get the feeling that Wired today is a front for The Sharper Image.

The sudden interest because of the IPO ..

[gangz]

The sudden interest in Google because of the IPO might not work for the good of the company.Google is a great search engine.I cannot do without it. It embodies both the spirit of classy entrepreunership and technical excellence. To be able to continue the same the Google management needs to remain more techno-market savy rather than turn to being just market-savy. As the article points out, more often than not the companies that went public bore the brunt of the public intereference. Agreed that lots of revenues need to be raised for a good growth, but then it should be acknowledged that with great money comes great expectations and if Google cannot continue the same it would face the red line too.

Another thing to note in the excellence would be the lack of proper competition. If Teoma or Inktomi can deliver good results I am sure people would use that. This field is not a field of muscle but brains, and the smarter ones always win

Typical Artist Designer Waste

[Cheesewhiz]

"...and a gallery of hypothetical interface redesigns by a group of artists and graphic designers."

Has anyone actually looked at this designs?

As a designer myself, I wonder if any of those people thought about their design actually being in use. This is art...and not functional art; modern, useless art.

I'm just thankful none of those designs stand a chance of taking over the simple serenity of the current Google design. Half of why I use Google of Yahoo! is because Yahoo! is crowded, teeming with irrelevent junk... and the current Yahoo! design has a tiny fraction of the artsy design funk of those options.

I think this is another case of artists abandoning reason for publicity :-)

Re:Ah, yes, google-bombs

[Dun Malg]

Ah, evidently the albinoblacksheep guys have never heard of the battle of Austerlitz,

Part of the Napoleonic wars, which France lost in the end.

the battle of the Pyrimids

also part of the Napoleonic wars...

or the battle of Verdun

With 143 000 Germans and 163 000 French killed, sounds like they were losing. Or, as the site put it: "Tied and on the way to losing, France is saved by the United States."

I think the site is about France not winning wars, rather than battles.

maybe I should start spending more time

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe I should start spending more of my time reading dotslash than slashdot :)

I like the artists/designers..

[linuxlover]

that WORK FOR GOOGLE *ALREADY*. These guys defied every dot.com/portal 'wisdom' and came up with a page with a logo & a text box. And that became a hit among people

Thank God one of these 'artist'/'designer' types, interviewed by Wired, are NOT employed by Google.

The lameness of the suggestions is beyond belief!

Google button in the physical world

[line.at.infinity]

This idea intrigues me. In Japan I've seen a handheld scanner + OCR + dictionary in one device. If the device had wireless internet access, then a Google search button would become a reality (although an actual dedicated button would probably not happen because real estate is expensive on handhelds). We already have cellphones with cameras - all we need is OCR and a nice software interface for web searching.

Google is thinking of a *real* redesign

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently google is experimenting with a new design already, screenshot here.

It only comes up when you access google through Opera.

Re:Google is thinking of a *real* redesign

[0x0d0a]

I can't understand what the point of having gradients is, aside from making the page render more slowly and download more slowly.

Re:Ah, yes, google-bombs

[reverseengineer]

If you dig a bit deeper into history, you'll find the French have won some stuff. They beat back the Moors at Tours in 732, which is why you (probably) don't speak Arabic. Curiously enough, the French did win the Hundred Years' War, despite losing most of the major battles like Crecy and Agincourt. Louis XIV also led France to a number of victories- they came out on top in the War of Devolution (which ranks up there with the Soccer War and the Chaco War as the best named war). There's the Napoleon thing, yes, and while I understand that it eventually all ended with Bonaparte rotting away on St. Helena, it did take England, Russia, and Prussia together. I mean, if you can't be impressed with that, then you can't really consider Germany to be a historically military power, since they tend to eventually lose once most of the other world powers ally to stop them.

Admittedly, the military history of France since then has been rather dismal. They lost to Mexico (Mexico, for goodness sake!) in that whole Maxmillian/Puebla/Cinco de Mayo thing, they were humiliated in the Franco-Prussian War, the Western Front of WWI sat in the middle of France for several years (regarding Verdun, though, that happened in 1916, so America was still on the sidelines), they were conquered outright in WWII (and had a large percentage of their population collaborate with their Nazi masters), and lost most of their colonial possessions in embarassing defeats (Dien Bien Phu, for instance).

Because of these things, as an American, I too have occasionally made fun of the French (favorite French military joke- "French rifles for sale- excellent condition, never fired, only dropped once!"), but hey, I can't be too hard on the French personally. I figure we do owe them pretty big for Lafayette, the Louisiana Purchase, Impressionism, cognac, the Statue of Liberty, existentialist philosophy, and French actresses- so take it easy on them, will ya?

Graphic Designer != HCI

[0x0d0a]

Graphic designers are not even remotely the same as HCI people.

Google has done a splendid job on their interface. They simply made their pages as usable and functional as possible -- small, fast, minimalistic. They don't *need* to brand their pages all over the place with images and whatnot, because they rely on having a tremendously good product. Google use spread like wildfire because it's *so* *good*.

I would hope very much that Google does not redesign their interface. There's no need to worry about it getting old. I think software vendors (or web page designers, who look at their web pages constantly and want to try new things) too frequently ignore the fact that users tend to like consistency. When I've supported Joe Users, most want nothing more than a reliable system that stays the way it is and keeps working. They don't *want* the UI changing around on them when they upgrade, they don't *want* menu options moving, etc. The less time you spend with the software/web site, the more annoying changes are, since it takes longer to learn the new interface.

I hope that five years from now, Google still has roughly the same interface (well, perhaps they could tweak their logo a bit, but that's it). It's become a screwdriver, a hammer, an indispensable tool in many people's toolkit. It changing under people's feet is not something that I see as being very popular.

What's wrong with graphic designers

[0x0d0a]

Yes, but how long does the appeal last?

Google is intended to be something that you look at day in and day out. Novelty just doesn't last long in such an environment.

The problem is that the graphic design industry has a long tradition of working on product design. Product design has one purpose -- sell the product. Get a potential customer seeing a product in a store or in use by someone else to be overwhelmed and make an impulse buy. Novelty is *everything* in such a situation. Making someone say "cool" is vital.

Websites don't work like that at all. With a website, one has to keep convincing people to use the website, every hour, every day. Novelty has little value. Eliminating irritations has much *more* value -- that page that takes just a titch too long to download and render, or that extra click that has to be made are irritations that build up over time.

Now, I'm quite sure that there are competent graphic designers working on web sites. However, the attempt to just drop a bunch of graphic designers on a website and assume that talent in traditional graphic design translates to immediate talent in website design is just silly.

The master does little, the fool much

[0x0d0a]

I'm sure a lot of people if questioned would look at Google right now and think "anybody could design that."

And yet, how few websites have caught on to the simplicity motif and designed their site around it?

Google's IPO will be the end

[0x0d0a]

I understand why the Google folks want very much to do an IPO. They made something great, and they want to enjoy wealth for it now. And I certainly won't argue that they should be expected to do something different.

However, I do think that the Google IPO will be the beginning of the end for Google -- that within a few years, Google will start to suck.

First, Google will IPO for a lot of money. The management will be expected to drive up company value even *more*. It will be a hard task, and I suspect that they will begin to attempt the same desperate moves that all the other .coms did post-IPO -- add an ad banner here, another there, partner with some companies to get higher rankings, log every click and sell usage data...decreasing the value of their product to increase short term profit.

Capitalism can, I think, drive companies to expand too quickly, especially in this age of entreprenurship and Internet companies.

Second, I suspect that once Google has a lot of money, they will begin bringing in more and more high-priced executives. Companies that do this start imposing deadwood and start their own decline. Those executives have friends that they want to bring in, and like to politick (after all, they're ambitious, and had to be to get this job). They must demonstrate their worth by coming up with a couple of initiatives and demonstrating that they make money. Adding something to the Google pages is a good short term way to come up with an initiative that produces results.

Then Google starts acquiring layers and layers of more management. These all consume money quickly, and more profits are required to keep feeding them. More pressure is placed on top management to increase profits to match increasing costs. After a while, it becomes apparent that it's easier to play dirty tricks and backstab to produce "results" than to actually move the company ahead. Play games with the accounting books (take a huge "one-time hit from reorganization" one year, and demonstrate unexpected profits the next year -- and this can even be done legally, thanks to accounting rules providing enough flexibility and loopholes). Say that a previous CEO screwed up -- fire him with a golden parachute, and hire someone else on, saying that the new guy will make tons of money.

I claim that publically traded companies are not efficient. They do not operate well. Their main benefit is that they tend to throw public assets back into capital goods, which theoretically improves the economy. I tend to think that the failings of large publically-traded companies outweigh the benefits...but heck, who knows.

I certainly can't dispute that the Google founders have done a good job and would like a piece of that IPO pie. I'm just sad that it will probably hurt the Web for the rest of us.

No he didn't

[0x0d0a]

No he didn't. He put an ellipsis at the end to indicate that there was something following, and expected readers to infer the text themselves.

Secondly, jokes tend to be funnier if one gives only the minimal amount of information for most people to get the joke. Driving one home *after* someone's got a joke weakens the punchline.

Furthermore, the Konami code has a number of variations, some of which do *not* end with "B A Start". The approach of the original user, whether intentional or not, let readers who had encountered different variations of the code than you have also appreciate the joke.

I'm not all that impressed with his work

[0x0d0a]

I just went to praystation.com and took a look.

First, Mr. Davis' design wastes a good chunk of my web browser's viewable area -- the whole thing is letterboxed.

Next, I have to wait for this little animation to go by when I start looking at the page.

I have my browser font sizes jacked up to be easily readable when sitting back from my monitor, as I am now. Works in all the sites I use -- but Mr. Davis' site has near-unreadable narrow-piped fonts with similar, dark colors all antialiased and stuck in a static small size.

One of his panes has a scrollbar. I figured it out because I use xterm, and have seen arrowless scrollbars before. Except Mr. Davis didn't even outline his scrollbar, or do anything to indicate that the thing *was* a scrollbar. There's just this big rectangle of gray that you can grab and drag.

Mr. Davis uses rollover highlighting. I think my opinion of rollover highlighting can be nicely summed up by analysis of an HCI person a ways back -- you use rollover highlighting when your interface is so unintutive that users aren't sure what to click on, and must wave the mouse over the interface to be enlightened. Rollovers became popular shortly after imagemaps did, when people had artsy but highly unusable designs containing a big image where it was unclear what was a link.

I cannot select and copy and paste text on Mr. Davis' site.

Mr. Davis chooses to force me to use visual transitions. When I click on anything on his site, I frequently have to wade for a fade transition to complete before I can read the next page. Fade transitions are no longer novel or interesting to users, and slow down anyone trying to navigate the site.

I see few things on praystation.com that could not have been done much better with a more conventional webpage.

Now, I will admit that many of the flaws in praystation.com are endemic among Flash designers, and indulged in by many others. However, that doesn't change the fact that I really don't like interacting with the praystation.com site, and I really *do* like using Google.

Re:I'm not all that impressed with his work

[elemental23]

My first impression is that he needs to higher a decent web designer for a more fundamental reason that the ones you mention: he uses <embed> rather than <object> for his flash, which causes it to not work in Mozilla at all. So all I got was an empty grey page. Brilliant.

Re:I'm not all that impressed with his work

[alib001]

I just went to praystation.com and took a look.

Stop right there. That's all you're supposed to do with sites like that.

You think anyone who actually wanted you to read what they were publishing would use tiny grey text on a grey background or tiny brown text on a brown background?

The Google redesigns segment was a gentle reminder of what could happen if "designers" were in charge. Everything looks pretty... but it doesn't work.

As a follow-up

[0x0d0a]

As a follow-up, I just dropped by your site (well, the one you have in your user info) and found it significantly more usable than Mr. Davis'.

Re:Ah, yes, google-bombs

[0x0d0a]

Louisiana Purchase

I dunno if I'd give the French many points on the "don't make fun of the French" meter for agreeing to that.

the Statue of Liberty,

Tidbit -- *after* they had built it and given it to us they couldn't get us to pay to *ship* it over to the US. It took Hearst and some other major business folks to try to rally together to raise the money. The Statue of Liberty is actually a bit of a US black eye when it comes to US history.

existentialist philosophy

One could argue that much of the social impetus for this derives from losing badly in World War II, though.

You clearly know your military history. Can you recommend any good military history websites?

Google worshippers be warned!

[n3m6]

http://www.google-watch.org/

There is more to google than the "i'm feeling lucky" button.

Re:Google worshippers be warned!

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you say paranoia?

Google is a private company. They do not have to release any of their information on how they operate to the outside world if they don't want to.

The only time they will have to is when/if they actually go public at which time they will have to file volumes of reports with the SEC as well as for their banking partners, investors, etc.

Never mind Google Mania...Ninnle Mania!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's taking the world by storm!

Ninnle Linux
NinnleBSD
The Ninnle search engine
NinnleMail
OpenNinnle
FreeNinnle
Ninnle OS

Everything's coming up Ninnle!

Google is Finite (Nitpick)

[Rick and Roll]

Shepard Fairey, I noticed is quoted as saying "The number Google is finite, but for all practical purposes it's infinite". AFAIK, "Google" isn't a number, but "Googol" is. I like his redesign though, but I think he was wrong about the designers never having that idea, in fact I think I recall them using it on a commemeration page, though I have no idea what it was for.

Never let a graphic artist....

[dspyder]

Never let a graphic artist.... anywhere near the google interface! Blink Blink... Flash!

--D

Good design is a universal(ly fruity) principle.

[Amiasian]

All I can say is this reminds me of (at least, in the early days) Apple's main design principle:
Focus and simplicity. I'm pretty sure Jobs himself was shoving that down people's throats, and I wish I knew where I could find a quote to back it up.
In any case, it all boils down to "do one thing, do it well."