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What if Google Had to Design For Google?

Posted by Zonk on from the horse-of-a-different-color dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Web developers increasingly grow weary of having to put so much effort into designing their sites according to the whims of the Google search engine. When the most important thing is 'getting indexed' it is increasingly difficult for web site designers to offer the simple, uncluttered user experience they'd like to. Reminiscent of the famed what if Microsoft designed the iPod box here is a humorous look at what would happen to that famed, clean, uncluttered look if Google had to design for the Google Search Engine."

5 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. The real question is... by ivan256 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If people designed their websites to serve their users instead of GoogleBot, would it matter that their pagerank was a little lower?

    1. Re:The real question is... by multipartmixed · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Would they HAVE any users if their PageRank was a little lower?

      Or - if a web page is put up on a server, and nobody is there to surf it -- does it make an impression?

      --

      Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
    2. Re:The real question is... by tknd · · Score: 3, Interesting

      There are other techniques for promoting a website other than using Google. One way is through word of mouth. For example there is no way I would have found slashdot because of a Google search. Rather, I found slashdot because I saw a friend browsing the site. Word of mouth is actually better than Google because it builds a trust relationship. For example if you go on Google expecting to buy something, how do you know that you should trust the first, second, or even third result on the page? You don't. But if a friend recommends a website to you because of their experience with it, you immediately have more trust in that website compared to some other random website.

      But as geeks, let's ignore that. After all, it involves socializing and dealing with people. Eww. Give me my Google exploits.

  2. Underscores is not SEO URL by sobolwolf · · Score: 3, Interesting

    http://www.meangene.com/google/ google_internet_search.html

    Well not to be an ass, but just in case people get the wrong idea about how to do a seo url, one needs to know that:

    Google sees hyphens as dividers in URLs and body text, and ignores underscores (underscore is not considered as a divider by Google).

  3. looks like iGoogle by nikqu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The last page looks like iGoogle to me.