Comments on: Did someone beat Google at design

By: xcaine

xcaine — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 13:59:14 +0000

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.

By: Benn

Benn — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 12:20:37 +0000

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.

By: Andrei Gonzales

Andrei Gonzales — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 06:43:38 +0000

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.

By: Thomas Eilander

Thomas Eilander — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 12:57:50 +0000

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.

By: Ben Reimers

Ben Reimers — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 10:45:51 +0000

"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.

By: kumailht

kumailht — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 07:07:26 +0000

"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.

By: Chris Ritke

Chris Ritke — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 04:38:13 +0000

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.