[josteink]

Apart from the cheesy look of the logo, that actually looks much better, nicer and cleaner than the monstrosity they are serving today.

It gives the user a very good, immediate overview of the results without bad, distracting UI noise all over the place. Sometimes less is definitely more.

Not that it bothers me much though, I've long switch to duckduckgo. They are actually innovating at this search-engine game, much unlike Google.

[wjk]

You cant be serious. I mean, it's nice that duckduckgo tries, but compared to google their "innovation" is basically non-existent. The amount of special cases and functionality google has added to their search engine the past couple years is massive[1]. They have become just fantastic at giving the user what they were searching for right away without even having to click on a link [2]. The use of space by google is so far ahead of DDG it's not even fair.

That which i have mentioned doesn't even touch the search algorithm itself, which I probably don't even have to say anything about because it's common knowledge how far ahead google is in that aspect too, not to mention all the search related settings you can configure if you have a google account, which also are quite massive.

Competition is good, but at this point there is no competition yet.

[1] - http://www.google.com/help/features.html [2] - http://i.imgur.com/rN0Vge0.png

[josteink]

You cant be serious.

Oh but I am. It's nice that you are attempting back your point with concrete examples, but none of those examples impress me. Those features are implemented in a way which I dislike.

And that's the thing here: Google has stopped innovating, at least as far as features I appreciate is concerned. Yes, that is subjective, but so are most of your points as well.

Personally I much prefer DDG's response[1] to your one search query. I think the focus-nessed of that response is much more impressive and innovative than Google's attempt.

Does Google even have a "Official site" feature yet? That's one of the few things which I use every day with DDG. It's one thing less I have to worry about when looking for things which are new to me.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/khbMz7p.png

[T-hawk]

Google has stopped innovating, at least as far as features I appreciate is concerned.

I agree. But, as always, we're not the customer, we're the product. Google continues to innovate on things that make money. Why would you expect a profit-seeking company to do otherwise?

[eric_cc]

How do you know what the official site for a text string is?

[DanBC]

> That which i have mentioned doesn't even touch the search algorithm itself, which I probably don't even have to say anything about because it's common knowledge how far ahead google is in that aspect too,

It is a source of great sadness to me that Google's algorithm, and the misuse of it be SEO scumbags, has fucked the web as a fun place to get information.

Even if we remove the scumbags we see a degraded web experience. Here's one example.

Play Dough recipe:

---- You need:

2 cups plain flour (all purpose) 2 tablespoons vegetable oil 1/2 cup salt 2 tablespoons cream of tartar 1.5 cups boiling water (adding more in increments if needed) food colouring (optional) few drops glycerine (optional- adds more shine!)

Method:

Mix the flour, salt, cream of tartar and oil in a large mixing bowl Add the boiling water Stir continuously until it becomes a sticky, combined dough Add the food colouring and glycerine (both optional) Allow it to cool down then take it out of the bowl and knead it vigorously for a couple of minutes until all of the stickiness has gone. * This is the most important part of the process, so keep at it until it’s the perfect consistency!* (If it remains a little sticky then add a touch more flour until just right) ----

With images this is, at most, a couple of hundred kB. But the page I get this from is over 2 MB.

(http://theimaginationtree.com/2012/04/best-ever-no-cook-play...)

It's a suboptimal experience. It's not even the ads that I dislike, I'm pretty tolerant of them. it's all the other junk and cruft. A 1998 WWW site would have had a recipe, and then had reasons for including the different ingredients, and an explanation of what happens if you don't have them. (and maybe it would have been collaboratively written by a Usenet newsgroup for their faq.)

[aestra]

Ajax search was the most disruptive part of the UI for me. I still don't understand the point of it. Well, I understand the auto-suggest, but why send me right away to the results page, and auto populate the results before I've asked you to? I'm not done typing yet. It's completely unintuitive behavior. It is jarring.

[mcovey]

You can get a quite simpler look if you disable javascript. Same goes for gmail, I've been using gmail's html-only interface (well, there actually is some js but its not required) and I get a kick out of how many complaints I hear about the new interface. The html-lite version still looks and acts a bit like gmail did in 2005.

Of course now that I've said that, it'll probably be gone soon...

[bsullivan01]

distracting UI noise all over the place. Sometimes less is definitely more.

Depends on the goal. Right now Google wants users to click on ads so if they make everything confusing, ads seems refreshingly simple. Also a link to a non-Google site means less chances on clicking on Google ads so they stuff search with Youtube crap, Local, Images...and they stretch the ads vertically to take virtually all the screen on top resolutions etc. A lot of times Google results for expensive keywords are totally out of whack, but ads are perfect.

Google is ripe for disruption and couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of folks. If they lose the Mozilla and iOS traffic it's a nice start. If we had a government, they wouldn't allow Google with all that market share to buy more.