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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.
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.
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.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
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.
I, for one, welcome our ...reigning... Google overlords.
True story.
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?
Free XBox, PS2
Google needs an interface redesign like fish need a bicycle.
Nathan
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...
Google management: Please read this, and don't change your page designs.
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
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.
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.
Mod Wisely.
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...
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
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.
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?
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."
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
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...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
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...)
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.
Just give it to a graphic designer.
The ones listed in the story were appalling.
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!
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
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.
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.
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
"Why would God give us a waist if we wasn't supposed to rest our pants on it?" - Rev. Roy McDaniels
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.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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
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.
May we never see th