I used to be a total Yahoo!-head before Google came into my life... this was about 30 months back and it just keeps getting better.
The first thing that hit me when I used google sometime in early 2000 was its speed. Mind you, I was in India then (a bandwidth starved country) and google was coming back with results faster than I could get my finger off the enter key!
No matter what I search for google uncannily turns up very relevant results in the first page. it is the gonzo search engine that is truly representative of the internet’s roots and purpose.
What I really dig.
1. In-yer-face Simplicity - The homepage is a classic study in usability and user-friendliness. minimalist design, consummate focus on its purpose and what is expected of it. I can imagine the kind of minds and the thought that go behind keeping the homepage just as it is without succumbing to the lure.
This is what Yahoo! used to be and in my opinion should have been had it not been for the commercial thrust and the ’’all things for the joy of all the peoples’’ credo that it now embraces.
2. fantastic speed - Any programmer will immediately marvel the sort of hardware tweaking, networking, database optimization and not to mention extremely intelligent algorithms and logic that would go into assuring the kind of speeds that the search engine returns with results. Bang on, time after time.
3. Eerily accurate results - Irrelevant search engine results are a joke category in itself. But google amazes each time even when I run a query which I know by its nature itself is bound to throw up some weird results. But when I see what I want, in the first screen I cannot help but wonder if google somehow read my mind!
4. Image searches that make sense - before images.google.com I had to rely on altavista’s hopeless image search engine and a site called ditto.com... the less I talk about it the better. You had to pity the image search engine programmers because it is such a wacko task to begin with. But when images.google.com made its entry it all seemed so simple. Once again, the relevance of its results pages had me shaking my head in wonder.
What they can do to make Google suck!
1. Start asking people to sign up (or heaven forbid PAY for its service). Not that I or a lot of people would mind paying, but the act of logging in everytime to use google takes away half the charm of using it in the first place.
2. Add ’’features’’ to the site. ’’Now that you are here why don’t you sign up for our free email account?’’ myname@google.com... I think not.
3. Start including ’’paid’’ results IN the results listing. Something that is a total put-off and a total waste of money for the advertiser. Because what it does is -
a. Ensure that nobody clicks on it (the advertiser would get more clicks if they showed up as a legitimate result item)
b. Create disillusionment and cause users to think twice about using google the next time they need to search for something.
Just keep it where it is right now. On the side and distinct.
4. Make it complicated. You only have to type ’’what is life’’ in the Jeeves search engine (https://ask.com) to see what I mean. Giving the surfer a lot choice does not necessarily mean it is better.
Paradoxically, search engine results are more meaningful and useful when they are less. 9 cases out of 10, The lesser the results the better the search engine. Unless of course your query was too vague to begin with.
Google is a portal in the real sense of the world. It is a gateway. Being a successful portal isn’t about making the site ’’sticky’’, as many misguided management types seem to believe. The trick in being an effective search engine is in letting them go where they want to go. Not conning them into staying longer and watching more adverts. Let them go and they will come back.
An appropriate real-world metaphor would be an airport. Imagine, an airport in a drive to increase its revenues, planned to intentionally ground flights so that passengers stayed longer and used the stores/phones/services more!! Sure they’d make a few extra dollars. But how many of those passengers will come back to that airport? What will they tell their friends and colleagues about their experience?
I think i’ve rambled enough, and frankly speaking this airport metaphor is beginning to freak me out. :)
All in all I would give google a big thumbs up for the good job they are doing all-round. Somebody really has a good head on her/his shoulders somewhere in google headquarters. And I would say keep it just where it is and don’t sell out!
(You can contact the author at public_relations@google.com)
You know I am kidding don’t you!!! tell me you do!!!