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Google Updates Its Face
whereiseljefe writes "About 12:00 am Central Time, at least when I saw it, Google changed it's face. Before it was a simplistic search engine, with a minimal front page, and now has become even more so. Those pretty tabs we have become accustomed to are now gone, and in the search results, the "summary" section at the top is now a faded blue bar (see here with a search returning ads). And the ads are a little more low key. Nice to know they are cutting back on their interface rather than adding spastically like Yahoo." Other folks noted that they've added Froogle and Local Directory pages have now been given links on the front page. Which is good, since inclusion in the main page tends to mean ready for prime time.
Google has a very smart team, a team who understand their market and cater to their every need. What I think is the best feature of Google is that they cater to their end-user, not their financial backers. To Google, it's important to please searchers, more so than advertisers. That makes me warm and fuzzy.
I would also point out, being a programmer myself, that reducing the bandwidth in each search is a positive goal for Google in cost reduction, and a positive side-effect to the reduction, is a much faster searching experience. Every bit counts when you have the traffic Google does.
Put them together and you have a winning team, with a winning service, and profit will ensue.
Sorry for sounding like a fan-boy, but I just can't say anything bad about Google, except maybe that the name Google is becoming annoying/overused, much like the over-play curse afforded to successful musicians.
A great example of, "less is more". No, not pagers.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Hah. My thoughts exactly. I almost added a droll comment about the sheer amount of submissions on SOMETHING THAT MATTERS NOT AT ALL, while meanwhile, Mars has confirmed methane which means most probably microbial life.
Yeah, I'm that guy.
The problem with the tabbed Google interface was that too many clickable elements were in the same space. I frequently found myself clicking on something other than the "Groups" tag by mistake, for example.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
But they changed more than the interface.
Doing a quick test search, I've noticed that it's so much more responsive. They did tweake the interface, but they also optimized download time. Think of how many searches are done every minute. Even a small size reduction can quickly add up!
Sure, they look like search results, but since they're in the same place as before, my eyes have been trained to totally ignore anything on the right side of the Google Results page. Even though they're not green (or whatever) anymore, I find it hard to believe that anyone who surfs the web more than 10 minutes a week would consider those to be "intrusive ads".
I like simple interfaces. While I use Firefox for most of my browsing, I also like Dillo a lot. The new Google interface reminds of how many websites come up in Dillo. While Dillo lacks many features, (that other browsers include by default) this is done by design. It is supposed to be very lightweight and for many browsing tasks, Dillo works just fine. It's good to see that Google is going for less clutter and overhead, while so many others are charging in the other direction.
www.mikesmind.com - www.daddyworkathome.com - www.freetofarm.org - www.tenfoottable.com
I guess it doesn't pay to write "proper" (X)HTML.
It does, but I guess Google are in the very exclusive club of "big enough to warrant all major browsers ensuring that they work with that website".
I wonder if they skipped the doctype tag because it's relatively pointless for this level of basic HTML
The doctype declaration (it's not a tag) indicates that the document conforms to a certain specification. Google not complying with any known HTML specification, it's arguably the correct thing to do to leave it off. Leaving it off means that browsers go into "quirks mode", whereby they deviate from the HTML and CSS specifications in an attempt to work around author mistakes.
and wasn't worth the bandwith demands to include it.
If Google were worried about bandwidth, they'd get rid of cruft like bgcolor=#ffffff and move the CSS into an external stylesheet. Assuming they employ front-end coders that know what they are doing of course (just because they are clueful on the back-end, it doesn't mean they are clueful on the front-end).
The front page will take a bit getting used to (now w/o the tabs) (see: Google cache of Google). OK, so it's really not that big a deal, we'll get used to the new version where the "tab" links are more squished together (note to Google: there's all that whitespace between the links waiting to be liberated!).
The real kicker is the new search results pages. Instead of utilizing most of the page as before for the actual results, and using B/W text for explanations, now they are highlighted by this ugly MSN/Yahoo-like pale-blue/green combo, which, (*GASP*) looks oh-so-similar to the text ads that are taking almost 1/3 of the page on the right. (see example: new search page.)
Well, I guess I'm not in the position to criticize a free, powerful service. But I guess if they are going to keep it free, they might as well try to keep the user experience as nice as possible. I'll still be using Google just as much as before, but I guess I'll be nostalgically longing for the good ol' days^H^H^H^H, uh, I mean 6 hours ago.- Alpha out.
If Google were worried about bandwidth, they'd get rid of cruft like bgcolor=#ffffff and move the CSS into an external stylesheet.
It may be that using the extra bandwidth is faster or more efficient than the extra http request for the external stylesheet.
ceci n'est pas une pipe |
A new design is nice and all, but what are they doing to combat the link networks that artificially inflate their own pagerank scores? For some searches you just get pages and pages of hits from "directory" sites that you've never heard of (that no one in their right mind would ever be interested in using) serving you banners and popups.
READY.
#
...Google goes public. That's when it will most likely jump the shark - just like most other high-flying tech companies forced to keep up that unrealistic opening stock price.
I predict you'll see them charging for more inclusive searches and trying to gouge their advertisers for more revenue.
Don't get me wrong, I hope I'm not right, but there's a long track record of others who have gone this way before. Google is smart, investors aren't.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Right off the bat without much customization they could shrink their logo by 7% by going to PNG instead of GIF using the exact same palette, drop it down to a 115 color pallete (almost unchanged visually, slight granularity added to shadow) and i can cut the file by 40%
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
And in doing so you discourage businesses who place targeted, low-key text ads.
Anything you can do, I can do meta.