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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."
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Derp de derp."
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...
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."
"The television is the retina of the mind's eye" - Videodrome
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.
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?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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.
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
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.
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...)
There is a "Google Worshipers" group on Orkut.
Join and embrace your inner Google!
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).
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.
Join Tor today!
-- 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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.
May we never see th
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.
.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.
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
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.
May we never see th