Google has an excellent philosophy, they keep it simple. I use Google everyday and love minimal design more than anyone else, but when a company as large as Google stops enhancing their designs, we have a problem.
When Google got into the scene, Yahoo was the king of the jungle. Google had a weapon to hunt, it was simplicity and a powerful search algorithm. Yahoo was shown real competition by two geeks in their garage.
It is true that no matter how good looking an interface, the power of search will always win, but how long do you think will it take for a smarter mathematician to make a better algorithm in his garage. It is just a matter of time and that day does not seem to be very far.
In my opinion Google needs to prepare for rainy days. It has the money and the staff to get better, why not spend a little more in the design department.
Enhancing the search interface isn’t exactly an easy job, but these guys at RefSeek have done a great job.
I am not saying that this is the absolute best but it is indeed an improvement and I am certain that there will be more to come in the future.
The above snapshot shows how much more pleasant it is to look at RefSeek’s design than Google’s.
I might be wrong and this is only my opinion, if so please correct me. I would like to hear what you have to say, so send in your comments.
If you have not already heard of the Graphical User Interface Competition I am hosting in a few weeks, you can learn more about it here. I am looking for sponsors for this event, if you are interested you can contact me at kumailht@gmail.com
7 Comments
Yeah, looks slick. I like it a lot. Except: looks like they don't have a whole lot indexed yet – just tried a few searches. They'd better get that crawler going. Because the most intuitive results page won't help if they cant find what you're looking for.
"RefSeek (rĕf-sēk) is a web search engine for students and researchers. RefSeek aims to make academic information easily accessible to everyone. RefSeek searches more than one billion documents, including web pages, books, encyclopedias, journals, and newspapers."
sorry, I forgot to mention that in the article. The point here is that there is more to search with design and refseek proves that.
"there is more to search with design"
In fact Google proves that "there is more to search THAN design". It's like movies: the best special effects in the world won't make a movie enjoyable if the story is terrible, but a great story can overcome almost anything. As with search: the prettiest design won't make the slightest difference if you can't find what you want, but if you can find what you want, right now, who cares what it looks like?
Of course there's probably more to it than that — for example that bolder, darker, larger text of Google is arguably more accessible for sight-impaired people than the lower-contrast text of Refseek. Also I doubt that a company with as much money as Google has, hasn't done extensive case studies with various designs to see what is most effective.
Google aims at ALL the users…. Everyone has to recognize the elements on Google's startpage immediately. That's why I think they don't style anything. An input field needs to look like a regular input field. Same for the submit button. In the search results: normal links are blue, visited links are purple. Everyone understands this. You don't have to think about it.
Try using refseek on IBM’s accessibility software, and then using the “poor eyesight” level. The gray text blur into something not quite readable. While the blue’s soften too far. And the green is almost unreadable.
There is a reason for the heavy contrast colors.
You guys are missing the point. It isn't about making a better search engine. He opened his article with a reference to the fact that a better search engine algorithm will come along. He said that to dismiss this point as it is not the focus of the article. Secondly, saying that google is "unstyled" is blatantly false. I bet you don't think you have an accent either. In fact, it is styled. It has a minimalist style as referenced in the article. All the author is saying is that they should continue with their minimalist theme but it could use some redesign from a user comfort perspective. I think the comment about user-accessibility was very keenly observed. I also liked the wikipedia favicon. I want to know how they filtered the metadata such that the distracting information like phone numbers and pronunciation are excepted. It was such a beautiful presentation that I barely believed it was the same results.
The layout is the reason why I use the search.yahoo site instead of google.
Its very close to google (add as many “very” as you want), but has with small adjustments with white-space made it so much more readable.