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Preview Google's New Search Results Page
ubermiester writes "Ars Technica demonstrates how to copy and paste a bit of JavaScript to preview a facelifted Google. Ars points out that 'the changes are minimal, but they give some insight into Google's plans.'" I thought we already knew those: world domination.
Apparently the first step towards world domination is to move the category tabs to the left of the search results. Ooh, I'm scared too.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
FYI, Google made it to the S&P 500 which, in addition to being a good milestone itself, means many mutual funds must purchase their stock which is at the moment is back in business.
I've read the article on the Ars Technica forum, and all the comments there. I'm inclined to think this is a nice change, but honestly, all they did was move the top links to a bar on the left. Its nice, and will probably look slightly better on my widescreen laptop, but its such a small change, I doubt many people will notice once it goes live.
Ummm, they've been experimenting with this for about two months now. I get a results page in this layout about once a week or so.
This guy's the limit!
it's good in that you know if it's worth looking at the other categories without clicking on anything.
Google employee takes a dump!
Slipping some away from the much loved and extolled absolute minimist page design to fit some mroe functionality in? I do agree though, definitely the first step to global domination.
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
I, for one, welcome our new column re-arranging overlords.
Post apocalyptic gaming goodness
Stuff 'bout Google.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Seriously, what is the point of this? I'm not trolling, it's just that when I search, I know if I want to look at images, groups, froogle et al. The layout just doesn't seem right to me. Hopefully, they'll make it an option whether to view results like this.
Why does this remind me of discussions I've witnessed about whether Greedo shoots first?
Very interesting... and somewhat disappointing. I was expecting to see a completely new interface, not the addition of a bar on the left side of the screen. Don't get me wrong, this is useful and a bit attractive.
/. communities response to this....I'm dying to know!
However, what I'd really be interested in is whether or not someone outside of Google could have come up with this code themselves? Or, is it an inside job? Or perhaps it is an "unofficial" preview release.
What is the
Matthew Wong
http://www.themindofmatthew.com
"I thought we already knew those: world domination."
I thought their goal was to spend all day smoking pot, eating Chips Ahoy, and watching Caliente or Martha. Oh wait, that used to be mine. From what I remember, college was a good thing.
For those who made the change and want the old way back, it's as simple as clearing the google.com PREF cookie in your browser. If you don't know how to clear a single cookie, then clear all of them and it will be included.
Anyone else agree the new interface is cluttered? The left side of your screen draws attention away from the organic and paid results.
Delete the cookie name PREF if you want to go back to the old interface.
I guess google must've detected that it was widescreen and changed the layout so that it i smore efficient in using the viewing window when fullscreened.
Because this interface leaves a lot of extra room in the left pane, it's probably a precursor to customized search categories (e.g. the ability to add a blog search, video search, financial search, scholar search).
Thanks /. it was amazing to see some of the text move left. Don't forget to keep us posted about other exciting changes such as Google's got a new coke machine or whatever. Us hackers get off on that, it's in our blood.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
In the article the assumption is, it's to get you to look at googles 'other parts'
I say it's to accomodate wide aspect monitors better.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Wouldn't it have been much cooler if the new Google was coloured text on a black background?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
This proves that the real brains behind Google is The Brain
Pinky's job is to come up with mispellings of words so you get somewhat meaningful "Did You Mean:" suggestions!
"Mentally confused and prone to wandering."
/sarcasm
Really, Slashdot, are you pandering after the Digg crowd with trivia like this? Slashdot set the standard for technology news so please give us news content with some substance. Then we can have some intelligent discussions instead of this one about how trivial this story is.
"First, the relocation allows for the actual search results to start higher up on the page. This is good because it means that users can expect to see more per "window.""
This isn't really true. Although the results start a bit higher up on the page, there is now a huge chunk of empty space on the left side. So, no, you are not getting "more [results] per window".
phew thanks. so, do you suggest I sell my Google stock? :)
Yup, I've seen it many times, too. No Digg.
Are these Google Pre-Hacks -- hacks for things that aren't released yet? What do you call those things?
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
you will be assimilated
Will this hack run on Booble? Y'know, so we can get to see Booble's 'other parts'?
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
now my mouse has twice as far to travel,
try putting on the right of the display nearest the scrollbar, that way i can move between options and the scrollbar with the minimum of mouse travel (=quicker)
iam not disabled and it sucks, iam sure this would make it worse for disabled users due to the increased movement distance
its as bad as Apple putting their window controls on the opposite side of the scrollbars, imho a terrible UI decision
AJ
The usability of this web site sucks. Now I can not directly reply to the article. I can only "reply the replies". Can anybody help me?
I like the 'new' layout, but it'd be nice if it was present on the images, groups, etc pages, to have the navigation skip around all over the place is very annoying.
also, they could fit more on the sidebar; like including book search, and, well pretty much everything at http://www.google.com/options/
An ajax interface would actually kick ass here; click 'images' and it loads the image results right into the results frame.
Also, can anyone tell me what the green bars to the right of each search mean? I would have guessed it was the number of results, but a search for "microsoft" yeilds nearly 3Bn web results, and only 60k news ones, but the news bar is more full than the web results.
If it's relevancy, then how on earth are they judging that 60 thousand news hits are more relevant than 3 billion websites?
Can we get a Google section, please? That way, I can turn it off and not see any more ramblings about a company that is waaaay too hyped for my taste. Thanks much.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Oh my god, Google did something! This means we just have to make a report on the front page.
Poit! Narf! What're we gonna do tonight, Brin?
-F
I wonder when Google will change their HTML to be compliant with the W3C recommendations? It is amazing that they are so far behind other companies with regard to markup quality.
Standards Schmandards
When you click on, say, "Images" on the left of the search results, you see the images, but then the sidebar is gone.... You should be able to click on Images, then Groups, then back to Web without it taking away your sidebar. It breaks the paradigm. But perhaps that's due for this being a beta thing.
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
Thank you for mentioning this. I thought Google was going nuts, but I never saw it again, so I thought I was going nuts.
At least if I'm going nuts, it's going to manifest itself in some other, more interesting (or at least entertaining) way.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
my google has looked like that for a month or so and I have no idea what I did to get it there.
:\
Apparently, I'm special.
But not special enough to have google talk available on my gmail account.
Silly google.
It's just Crap.
I finally arrived at the same conclusion, but untila fter hours of soul searching.
Google or Taliban?
Google or Taliban?
Google or Taliban?
But once I realized the Taliban would shoot me rather than consider moving the tabs, the choice became easy.
This isn't something new or revolutionary. Yahoo already does this.
Pure the fact /. is reporting a possible GUI change of Google's search engine shows a) Google with this much attention will become head of Bubble "2.0" and b) /. will, if they not change course, share responsibility.
This is google's new plan? Taking away the Ads?
:)
That'll make the S&P folks happy
I'll bet it was off-white. Or maybe transparent and chrome.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
They're designed to get people to search google's other databases. Right now, if you use google search engines, you can click on those links above and get results relaetd to the search you just did. Adding relevance indicators makes this more obvious, but it simply wouldn't work horizonatally. Even if it did, as google adds more types of search it would eventually be infeasible. Strangely, the search categories aren't ordered by relevance to the current term.
Searching journal articles and the WWW for text makes some degree of sense, but searching for images via text is less useful, and video even less so. TheESPGame is an interesting site where you tried to guess how another person describes a picture. A picture might be worth a thousand words, but only perhaps five of them would be commonly used between people. Fortunately, we know what they are, so that game is winnable. This is what makes Google's ability to extract relevant words reguarding pictures on the web tenable, but these days I'm more interested in ways to improve search in ways Google isn't doing anymore.
I've seen a site that lets you draw images and it returns pictures that closely match. It was real neat, but not the sort of thing you can just leave on a single server on the internet; it got nailed by sites like slashdot. Donno if it's a performance problem or just scaling problems, but I'd like to see it come back some day.
Similarly, it'd be neat to have audio search based on audio samples. The music genome is interesting, but it represents a huge investment of the ESP game sort. They describe various attributes of music and their Pandora tool lets me ask for music similar to that. I'd imagine it'd be far more entertaining if people could hum or sing a few lines into a mic and the computer searches for likely candidates, like a Seinfeld episode or something.
up up down down left right left right B A Try it. It works.
Yeah. Holy s***. It's amazing what will warrant coverage on this site.
They overbook, they rely on the fact NOBODY will use up ALL their storage, if everybody does there would not be enough to go around. AN anology is airline seat over-bookings. We all know what happens then.
But seriously, it's not really a bad change, but I prefer it the old way. Of course, it's not really that big of a change to worry about either way.
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
but it *did* turn on Personalized Search (Beta), and gave me a link to turn it off in the same column, but be warned.
(BTW the "News" selection linked the /. story only, missing the Ars Technica bit entirely)
Have I been one of the unfortunate ones that haven't had the pleasure of seeing this new format? Looks interesting.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
Something weird for me, every 50 searches or so, it goes straight to google.com/ig (the portal) when I hit google.com. Strange stuff.
world domination? I think Google is more into moon domination
Well I think I'd notice. CNN's website just went from their vertical section interface to a horizontal one, and I noticed it immediately. Strange that they would do this just while google dabbles with the opposite. Coincidence?
I want them to bring back GoogleX
... Um ... new.
Originaly over at Google Labs GoogleX page it got mirrored over at Tech Info Blog who has it in all its glory.
I want to see that one put into place. New changes are rather
Next they need to add Thumbnails. Besides they have the power to take a pretty little picture. Heavily optomize it. Have a cookie setting to turn it off and they will be instantly accused of copying of copying ASK.com.
Considering that the interface hasn't changed in a long time this might be fun.
Procrastinating life a way at a rapid rate of speed.
The best minds in the world, all of whom have been hire by Google, came up with that new UI. I'm simply blown away by how good it is. It needs to be reported in every single media outlet on the planet because it's so earth shattering. You've really gotta hand it to Google - it makes the efforts of mere mortals look paltry by comparison. I don't know why /. even has news stories about other companies.
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
It's great and all, but could anyone post a snippet of JavaScript to change it back? I'm used to the old one, and there's way too much empty space on the screen for my tastes.
This probably isn't worth my allowing cookies and javascript for google.com.
tried the instructions, they don't work. keep getting 'this page cannot be displayed' message
That is uglier than sin!
MS and Yahoo better do something equally innovative to catch up. Google's really leading the pack now!
It appears that the green bars beside the other categories don't actually portray the number of search results for the other categories. They remain the same from search to search, even when a given search returns no results.
Once they merge Google with Gmail, and Foogle, and whatchamagoogleit, using AJAX, then browsing will be a different experience...yes, world domination, but Mr. G (not related to sex at all) also have the same plan.
but, google is not ranking sites like they use to...I see people moving away and using MSN Search and Yahoo Search a bit more.
(horrified) What do I do? What do I do?
"Ars points out that 'the changes are minimal, but they give some insight into Google's plans.'" I thought we already knew those: world domination."
The link made reference to world domination, and I made a joke in reference to this - that resistance to Google's world domination is futile. I know I'm being repetative, but the comment is reference to the implicit topic being alluded to - i.e. world domination. If you don't find it funny, that is fine. But while it is not on the explicit topic of 'google's new page' it alludes to the implicit 'joke' of world domination by google made by Zonk. Considering the power google has amassed in the last few years and their company motto, a joke in reference to the implicit topic being discussed (even if you don't find it funny) is not off topic. Sheesh.
I've had this for a few days now, I use personalized homepage UK fyi.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
I've seen google.co.uk show results with the new layout a few times. I thought, "Huh, they've changed the layout" and wondered why it changed back on my next search. Presumably they've been testing it, but I would have thought more /. people would have noticed. Or maybe I'm just special.
Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel."
How about instead of just making this the default layout, let us choose our own with CSS. Firefox allows you to select alternate style sheets, so why not just have this new layout be one of the options.
you can bet your house on it will be in beta(the online version of being afraid of commitment). :)
This design isn't new to me. Whenever I do a Google search on my mom's laptop, the results page looks very similar to that, the only difference I can see is the green bars. Strange...
Article posted on Digg perhaps 24 hours ago, maybe more
People comment on the user interface of Google. It's a text field and a button. The only improvement I could imagine is that the links are checked before they are returned to me. Currently the most common result is 404!
Apparently the cookie that gets set by that javascript changes several things on google because it also slightly changed the look & feel of gmail. It's not a big difference and it definitely looks unfinished. I am guessing this cookie just lets you run google's latest betas perhaps?
This is old hat. http://vivisimo.com/ has been doing this for ages. I guess that this is only 'new's to those that won't, or can't look beyond google.
Earlier today I noticed some other irregularities in google's search results. They seem to be a bit manipulative in the results they present. I've noted them in my blog: http://www.achievo.org/blog/archives/34-Google-sta rting-to-think-for-me.html
Google has changed a lot in its interface over the past year. Has anyone else had the following problem?:
I'm living in one country but want to see results from another (in my case, I'm in Germany but I want to see English results). In the good old days, google had a radiobutton that let you choose between "results from the web" and "results in German" (or, rather, "Deutsche Ergebnisse"). But not anymore. Now, even if I explicitly type "www.google.com" in my address bar (firefox, in English, with locale set to US), the stupid server hands me back a google.de redirect. The radiobutton is gone. So is the point in the preferences where I could, back in the day, decide that I wanted results in all languages. It's been replaced by a list of checkboxes where I can, in principle say I only want results in English. But, heavens, I want results in German AND English. Okay, so I check "English" and "German".
Guess what I get? A preordered list with all the German results first (since I'm on google.de. What else could I want anyway?), then the English ones. Like, first the result from de.wikipedia.org, while the English one is nowhere to be seen.
Hey Google! Some people don't live in their homecountries. Yet they fucking want to see results in their own language. It's completely beyond me how a company that has fostered globalisation so much could possibly exclude all ex-pats from their interface.
I've now changed to yahoo (which still has the "results from the web" button). Let's see how long until they will abandon it, too.
Now, how do I turn this thing off ?
...when you could just make those images larger and set them as a background for the text? Only reasons I can think of to not do it is that it might require a different color for the link text, and you would waste some space making all the links the same length as the text of the longest one. That said it would take up a lot less space than the current idea.
Slashdot: Where anecdotes and generalizations can be freely substituted for facts, logic, or intelligence
..all you jokesters making fun of the "innovative" change of moving the categories to the left. And you're right, it's not revolutionary, but evolutionary.
.45 ACP, Google.... all these things are great because they're dirt simple and do exactly what they were designed to do with no cruft.
But I feel the need to point out that it's an excellent move (IMO) BECAUSE it's evolutionary. Look at the ridiculous mess that is http://www.msn.com/, with all its ads and news articles and links to other MSN resources [1]. Then consider http://www.google.com/. It has the word "Google" (sometimes themed for a given holiday), a search bar, the a "search" button, all smack in the middle. Everything else is in small standard or linked text.
It's a testament to elegantly simple design. The claw hammer, the Volkswagen Beetle, the Colt M1911A1
I just had to say it.
-Glee
[1] Notice that search.msn.com itself has been cleaned up to look almost exactly like Google.
Many a true word hath been spoken in jest -- mod funny posts "Informative".
What this shows us is that Google is aligning its Gmail and Google Search layout. So, with this new layout, it make is much easier for them to now populate the left column with their other apps, like Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Writely, GTalk. This small change could be very useful in helping Google users to bring their Google services together.
Sweet,
The person whomanages PREF=ID=fb7740f107311e46 can now look at all of the search terms entered by slash dot readers.
A back door by the Department of Justice to capture Google search queries?
comp.lang.ja...ogrammer
microsoft.pu...x.avalon
microsoft.pu...indowsxp
alt.personals.spanking
soc.sexuality.spanking
aus.comms.mobile
comp.os.linux.announce
comp.lang.functional
comp.editors
comp.lang.scheme.c
Y! pioneered this in the early days, put the alternate searches at the BOTTOM of the results. How many times have YOU, the reader, scrolled through 50 results and then scrolled back to the top just to click GROUPS???? Putting those alternate searches on the bottom would save millions of scroller miles per day! :)
This is a huge advancement. I just found out that sex is as big in news as it is on the web. Also, you can get just as much sex locally as on froogle. Damn that internet is useful.
SearchIRC - Now with live chat directory!
Remember Turbo10.com? And how much it's useless? Well, there is another search engine that I actually find myself useing. It's called clusty.com. There are 2 really cool features of this search engine. First, it clusters stuff. Like, let's say you are searching linux desktop. You go to google and search, you get all kinds of stuff...pretty useful I agree. However, you search clusty, and the results are broken down by subject...operating system, kernel...desktop. Very cool for research.
The second cool feature is that in the search result itself, you can preview the page. Just click the magnafying glass.
Use clusty 20% of the time, it's cool!
-- A cat is no trade for integrity!
"I thought we already knew those: world domination."
...You forgot mars
Argh, their prefs cookie break GooglePorn, erm I mean it sets safe mode search to on, so, no more boobies! Well, it's easy to fix, but just be warned.
...that a search for "show me the money" does NOT come up with stock results for Google. Who woulda figured.
There are 10 types of people in the world; those who can read binary, and those who can't.
I see the green bars but the most noticeable difference is the large area of whitespace at the right of the page. Google ads are Gooooone. I'm using Proxomitron with pretty much its default settings and Google's ads usually do show.
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
Did anyone try this with Firefox? I tried with FF 1.5 and it didn't work =/
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