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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."
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
Thalasar
" 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.
"Derp de derp."
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...)
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.
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