Slashdot Mirror
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.
When they first bought in the Beta it didn't look too impressive to me (not being in the US), but it works pretty well and has a hell of a lot more shops.
Despite how much I hate advertising, when I actually *want* to see adverts about a product, it is hard to find.
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
The same godawful color schemes, ugly nexted tables, awful HTML code, etc.
Maybe slashdot should take a cue from google and update themselves.
Come on... I mean, really.
A website added some links! News at 11!
except maybe that the name Google is becoming annoying/overused
But look at the poll results: Google only got 3%. I don't think it's overused in a bad way; I think it's overused because you'd be foolish to use anything else!
I just use safari or firebirds embedded google search... who needs a front page!
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
"And the ads are a little more low key" . Really? I find them more intrusive than before, because they look like the search result, and thusly my eyes tend to catch them more than before. And I'm pretty sure that's the idea.
Underholdning.info
I particularly like the idea of seperating "Froogle", I hope in the long term this will bias commercial support away from the generic pages. When I want to know about Hawaii "per se" I am just not interest in tour operators and hotels!
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
They don't look like Yahoo at all. When I go to Yahoo, I have to search for the search bar. That is not how it should be, and that is not how Google is.
The (definition) feature next to your search query does something I've sought for a long time - it searches dictionary.com. The built in "Define:search query" never worked well for me, so this is a pleasent surprise.
I'm pretty sure I've seen this interface before, well atleast the colour scheme, in firefox. I even compared it to IE and found that they were both different, was this a CSS rendering error, forgetting to include images, or the new interface?
Google isn't valid HTML either. And they still use an embedded style element rather than a highly-cachable external stylesheet, and still use crap like <body bgcolor=#ffffff...
Unfortunately, it still doesn't validate!
All they did was change the layout.
With the old layout I could navigate the page blindfolded.
I had mouse movements down pat.
The tabs being close to the first search result was handy.
Now you have to navigate to the very top, center of the page.
I've never seen a reason to change an interface, just to change it.
The new look may be simpler but the old one had familiarity going for it.
Now that MS and Yahoo are picking up the pace and investing heavily against Google to outcompete it, is this really the time to change Google's look? Search functionality may be all that matters to a geek, but Google is mainstream now and has to worry about mainstream concerns, like "Branding". Google's old look was part of the Google "brand".
I may come off like Chicken Little given that this is such a small thing to be concerned about, but sometimes in the face of heavy competition the smallest things can turn the tide. I've seen it happen.
I will admit removing the little bits of excess are nice, but I actually liked the tabs, and used them alot (for images/news in particular) and liked them being under the search bar as my mouse would have been closer to that...
/. effect so we can all at least have an equal chance to troll about our opinions...
Anyways time will tell how this goes... On the flip side this is one site that can handle the
I noticed the new interface just before this story was posted. I don't really like it. I much prefered the old "tabbed" interface. While the newer interface is minimalistic, it almost looks amaturish.
For instance, Google groups search result pages looks like they are formatted for a 800x600 resolution screen. Viewing it at a higher resolution forces a large white space between the search listings and the ads. I would have much prefered for the results to take up this space, fitting more results on the page at a time. If the group name is long, then the "View Thread" becomes unnatural looking wrapped between two lines. (example)
Maybe it's just new, but hopefully it'll grow on me.
Just for grins, compare to altavista. Altavista's UI is quite clean... looks like they've taken a cue from google.
yahoo = 4 pages of CRAP google = a search box
Is it a boat?
I have google set to appear in Welsh by default, and that frontpage has not changed. It is only the english/standard frontpage that has changed as far as I can see.
I see the translation teams have some work to do...
HTML is broken, not google.
LaTeX - it's not just for bootie calls
More interesting is the wayback machine's caches of Google:
Strangly enough, the google cache of google still has the old front page in it (as of 9:35am EST Monday). It's sort of cool to compare the two side by side.
But for some reason it does give me my local page and not the international version, eventhough the cache link says google.COM.
I saved a copy of the page at the following URL: http://www.phrise.com/google.html (I added <base href=http://www.google.com/> at the top.)
If you're seeing the same thing, please reply...
Altavisa used to be pretty clean, eg this 1998 version. I've often suspected that Google's initial popularity was due to Altavista's desire to be a 'portal' (remember them?) and the subsequent cruft that invaded their front page. They even tried to backtrack with Raging (and isn't that minimal now?) but I suspect people found Google was also a better search engine, rather than simply cleaner, and never went back.
Slashdot looked deep within my soul and assigned
me a number based on the order in which I joined
Google getting overused?
What I find most ironic is that this is one of the rare occasions when I knew before the article appeared on Slashdot!
In fact, that would suggest that Google is one of the few sites that I visit more often that Slashdot!
perl -e 'print "Just another Perl newbie\n";'
I can. Many people look at Google as an authoritative source. Hence, the gripes you hear about businesses who are made or broken by their Google search result rankings. Now we have Froogle. The danger is worsened even more if people view Froogle as authoritative. Last week I was searching for non-U.S. made baby strollers. I found strollers using normal Google that I couldn't find in Froogle. The only thing I trust Froogle for is to view quick thumbnails of products. For most of my product searches I must rely on complex queries to bypass the senseless froth I see rising to Google's surface more and more these days.
My one wish for Google is for it to face stiff competition. I look forward to anyone who can topple Google with a better engine.
If there was ever anything about Google that sucked, it's the Linux search.
- Search for Gnome
- Search for KDE
- Search for Enlightenment
- Search for Linux Kernel has a link from inside kernel.org as the 4th result!
Not one returns the actual home page of these projects! Yikes.
Am I a hipster-doofus?
- If your search matched a category, it was displayed at the top.
- If a particular hit matched a site in the directory, the category for this site was shown above the "URL - cached" line of the hit.
The old behaviour can still be seen when using an odd language setting (like Swedish chef). See for instance this search for "java":http://www.google.com/search?hl=xx-bork&q=java and compare it with the new google interface:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=java
I think this is a sad loss of functionality. The link to directory categories served two purposes for me: First, it was some kind of extra "quality" check -- if a web site was listed in the directory, it was more likely to be the site I was looking for. Second, it informed me in a non-intrusive way that a directory category existed that'd probably help me in my search.
And to add insult to injury, Google has removed the simple link to Directory from the "tabs", so you have to first click "More>>" to find the Directory search, making it even hard to use it. I wonder if this is the first step in stopping to support the dmoz directory?
They've done more than a facelift. My Blogger (now owned by Google) archives were being intermittently indexed over the past few months. At times I could retrieve items via Google, at other times I could not.
Today I can search them. I wonder if they've done a major maintenance cycle on their indices? That would fit with the speedup reports.
BTW, I do enjoy using the new "define" feature. Try "define: glycoprotein" for example.
John Faughnan
jfaughnan@spamcop.net
First thing I noticed is that their homepage doesn't validate as correct HTML because it's missing the DOCTYPE part... :
.000000002 Gigabytes...
Then I remembered that they get 1800 queries per second, that means also about 1800 homepage/result page views.
So to have the page validate would cost them about
1800 * 3600 * 24 * 150 bytes (size of the DOCTYPE def. to be added) = 21.72 Gigabytes of Bandwidth per day!!!
You can't refuse these kind of savings...
On the other hand, some of the special language versions certainly add more than 150 bytes to the homepage length...
just my
Q.
But surely using a stylesheet carries extra processing/bandwidth overheads?
No. Firstly, it's true that there are downsides, it's just that in most cases, and especially in the cases of high-traffic dynamic websites, they are vastly outweighed.
Firstly, bandwidth. A second HTTP request will include headers that, in the case of a simple page like Google, will actually be almost as large or possibly larger than the stylesheet.
This is outweighed by the fact that in almost all cases, the stylesheet will be retrieved from a cache rather than the Google servers. Either the browser's cache or the ISP's cache (almost all ISPs have one, and use of interception proxies is growing). This is a very popular website, and the stylesheet doesn't change much, so caches will give the stylesheet priority in the cache, so it will almost always be available from the ISP cache, even if an individual user has never visited Google before.
Also remember that the CSS cannot be cached when it is embedded in the HTML, as Google's pages are almost all inherently uncachable.
Another thing to note is that even when the external stylesheet passes its expiry date, browsers and proxies can revalidate it ("make it up to date again") without downloading it again. All it takes is a single 304 Not Modified response from Google to say "yep, nothing's changed on this end".
Secondly, a second resource, such as an external stylesheet, will often require a second TCP connection. More and more browsers are implementing HTTP 1.1 style persistent connections, and old-style HTTP 1.0 persistent connections are widespread, so this isn't as much of an issue as it used to be. Even so, the fact that people will almost never download the stylesheet from Google's servers means that the impact of this second connection, where it is necessary, is far lower than you might expect.
Remember, as well, that external stylesheets can be offloaded onto a static-only web server, in the same way Slashdot do to serve images. In-kernel webservers like Tux can dramatically speed up serving speed, but that only works for static files like images and stylesheets, not dynamic pages with embedded style elements like Google currently use.
Finally, if they are worried about bandwidth, external stylesheets are very compressible, and it's many orders of magnitude more efficient to compress a single external stylesheet than to compress each and every page view dynamically. Even if they want to compress each page dynamically anyway, it will still reduce resource use by removing the styles from the pages.
Opera users have been seeing the "new" page for quite a while when they use the integrated google search. I've been wondering what's been going on until today...
Consecutive white space does as long as they're all the same type of whitespace, like all tabs, all spaces, etc. Having a single character of whitespace between two other characters is a different story.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
- Which links people find the most interesting for a particular keyword. (User's first click).
- Which search results are "deceptive". (User clicks one search result, then another within a few seconds.) This could be very useful for additional spam detection. They could compare the stats with those for the pages that were reported as spam.
- The first most useful match. (User's last click.)
I'm only wearing half a tinfoil hat, but I really wanted to bring everyone's attention to this new feature and see who is/isn't seeing it. I got to this discussion late and was really surprised that noone had mentioned it yet.P.S. I am now seeing at work when I look with IE but not with Opera.
Actually, if I remember correctly, this is about what Altavista has looked like for some time now. Also note that by doing a WhoIs for Altavista.com, you will find that Altavista is owned by Yahoo!... Which I just don't know about, to be honest. I use their mail service, but their search page is so bloated and ugly, full of content I neither want nor need from a search engine. As a result, Google is set as my home page, and when I want to check my web-mail account, I have a hotlink directly to https://mail.yahoo.com (cleartext password transmission is bad, mmmm'kay?). When I want information, want it fast, and want it organized in manner that at least vaguely appears to be relevant, I go to Google.
Waaayyyyy back in the day when I used to work at D.E.C. ('97 to early '99), I and most of my friends and co-workers swore by Altavista... Guess it also didn't hurt that I could feel the hum from the servers that powered it through my chair some days. Boy have things changed, but then, not much changed for the better after the Comwhaq buyout.
One major annoyance with Google lately though... Those stupid results that come back as the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th result for evey search I've run in the last month+... You know, the ones that say "Find 'x' using the free 2020 search toolbar", and, "Find 'x' on smartpages.com," and "Find 'x' With Free Websearch Tools." What is up with this??? Why for they cannot make these go away, bitte? If I wanted to search for these somewhere else, I would do so. Why is Google doing free advertising for these people, as they are obviously not paid ads, but standard returns that appear to be just a database/dictionary/meta-tag exploit... Someone at Google must know about this, and I just don't understand why it's been allowed to continue, as this has completely ruined so much of their credibility since now 3 out of the first five results of any query are now completely unrelated and inaccurate =(
Otherwise, I've been loving on Google about 2 1/2 years now, and I haven't really looked back, even when I read sites (1, and 2) that called into question google's privacy practices, I wasn't really deterred, but these bad returns may be all it takes to make me start considering another move.
"Inveniemus Viam Aut Faciemus" 'We will find a way... Or we will make one!' --Hannibal of Carthage
When I was faced with a link farm, I reported it and in a week or two the search results were much improved (not sure how long it took, I didn't search for it again for a while). They do react, when you tell them about it.
Just a thought: considering the amount of http hits they get daily/hourly/minutely or even every second, it just makes sense to serve as simple pages as possible. If not only for the bandwidth but also processing time: creating a 60KB HTML page out of a template takes only slightly more than a 5KB HTML page but considerably more when you multiply that by a few thousand hits per second, divided by the available processing power (even if they have much of that, too), it all starts to matter again.