[eagleal]

I think everyone misses the point of the design choice of Google, and many others. By tests I can confirm that a mathematical (analytical) approach to design, it's better (read processed better) than the majority of purely visual ones.

I can repeat this all the day: Google search, it's one of the most well designed web applications in the entire web.

GMail? Not so much. I have done some (NDA research) email UI/UX "design" at my company, and by tests (just the second revision), I reduced the lookup (finding items), for first-time computer users by 57% over gmail, by 41% over hotmail, and by more than 700% over ymail (2008). This because of a more cautionary choice of color of the controls. This was the goal.