Google Updates Its Face

whereiseljefe writes "About 12:00 am Central Time, at least when I saw it, Google changed it's face. Before it was a simplistic search engine, with a minimal front page, and now has become even more so. Those pretty tabs we have become accustomed to are now gone, and in the search results, the "summary" section at the top is now a faded blue bar (see here with a search returning ads). And the ads are a little more low key. Nice to know they are cutting back on their interface rather than adding spastically like Yahoo." Other folks noted that they've added Froogle and Local Directory pages have now been given links on the front page. Which is good, since inclusion in the main page tends to mean ready for prime time.

Re:Why are they trying to look like Yahoo!?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's probably because you go to the Yahoo homepage instead of the Yahoo Search homepage: http://search.yahoo.com/

Google Web Alerts

[manmanic]

Google also announced their web alerts [google.com] at the same time. Looks interesting, but not as feature complete as Google Alert [googlealert.com] which has been around for some time.

That has been around..

[Raven42rac]

This has been around for a while. It was completely random for a while (for testing one would assume). I used to have a bookmark that would toggle the look back and forth, but I seem to have misplaced it.

Re:Definition

[JimDabell]

The old Google used to do this too - the term was underlined and you could click on it when there was a matching entry in dictionary.com. Obviously it wasn't prominent enough, and so they explicitly noted the definition link in this new version.

Re:Why are they trying to look like Yahoo!?

[stry_cat]

Once you find the search bar on Yahoo, do a search and then compair the look and feel of the results page with the look and feel of the google results page.

Wrong page brother.

[Chess_the_cat]

Nice to know they are cutting back on their interface rather than adding spastically like Yahoo.

You're thinking of Yahoo! the web portal. Yahoo!'s search engine page [yahoo.com] looks pretty plain to me. They haven't added anything to it.

Google Web Alerts & Personalised Search Page

[kieranbenton]

Is it me or are these new additions? Both look to be quite interesting, could be useful to know if new pages appear on a closely defined research topic. Not too sure about the personalised search yet havent had enough chance to play... Google Labs Link [google.com]

Get your Google Account!!

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.google.com/accounts/

sign up now!

updated adsense as well

[stonebeat.org]

If you guys use Google's adsense, you might have noticed that have lot of new themes as well. I guess, to make the Ads blend in more with your webpages, and make them lowkey.

P.S. Google Adsense is Ad banner engine, using which you can add Ads on your website and generate some ca$h

Re:I saw

[Anonymous Coward]

They've been randomly testing it on various people. I first saw it at least a month ago; I think it's at least a few weeks older than that.

Re:Good!

[crazyprogrammer]

not all the tabs are gone. if you go to directory.google.com [google.com], the tabs are still there(as of 8am CST).

Different versions of Google

[Pete (big-pete)]

I find it interesting to see the slight variations of Google...geeky although it might seem - when I type http://www.google.com/ [google.com] I am thrown to http://www.google.be/ [google.be], so when I really want http://www.google.com/ [google.com] I type http://www.google.com./ [www.google.com] instead of using the "Go to Google.com" button (which sends me to the google.com page with a "Go to Google Belgium" button.

The definitive address with the dot at the end introduces itself as Google English in the graphic, but still has a "Go to Google.com" button, whilst clearly being the genuine definitive http://www.google.com./ [www.google.com]...but this version doesn't have the link to Froogle [google.com]... :)

Phew - that's enough links to Google for one day!

-- Pete.

Lynx

[SharpFang]

What's curious, it looks in Lynx almost the same as in Mozilla!

Say what you want, I like it!

Re:Meanwhile...

[Saint Stephen]

Turn on the "light" theme: no slashboxes, just black and white text. Then use Firefox with AdBlocker extension to block the ads.

Re:/. could learn from this

[javatips]

Just use the text/low-bandwidth version of slashdot (go check your user preferences).

It more lean and clean that way and load a lot faster that the ugly default look.

Google News still has much of the old look

[Faies]

My homepage is set to Google News [google.com] and thus was where I first noticed the changes. From the perspective of the front page and search results, the new look does quite well, but it's not as true for News IMHO. The side and top bars have retained their old looks, with brighter colors and well defined lines. Meanwhile, the links at the very top sport the new style, and don't seem to go well with the aforementioned items.

Re:Meanwhile...

[Malc]

Actually this isn't funny, this a real problem. It's not related to a particular version of Firefox, just a corrupt (in some way) installation. I had the problem with Mozilla 1.4 - it just started happening after a few months. It was really annoying. I installed Firefox 0.8 and it was fine. TehHustler: uninstall, remove your profile, installation directory, etc, and then try reinstalling it.

Re:Google Web Alerts

[markkellman]

Had a look at both services. Both seem easy to use. Google Alert [googlealert.com] seems to offer more personalization features and deeper searching per term... On another level, Google seems to be drawing inspiration from its API developers?

Linux Searches?

[cyranoVR]

Dang...I knew about Google's Linux-targeted [google.com] searches but I never remember to use it when I'm having having installation/upgrade issues [google.com].

Definitely going to bookmark that one...Google has saved my butt many-a-time during while learning Linux (but I've had to wade through a lot of irrelvant search results to get to what I needed).

Re:New google fizzles

[mitchkeller]

The Linux search has been there for at least four years now. It might not have been linked, but Google: Linux [google.com] has been on my bookmarks bar for a long time now.

Re:New google fizzles

[twoflower]

But it does have a new Linux Search link here under specialty searches. here

That's been there for at least four years [archive.org]. That's not exactly new.

Re:Fatal Error

[Anonymous Coward]

It may be that using the extra bandwidth is faster or more efficient than the extra http request for the external stylesheet.

That's extremely doubtful. In almost all cases, the stylesheet will not come from Google's servers. They are a popular website and the stylesheet rarely changes, so the chances of it being in somebody's browser cache are high, the chances of it being in their ISP's cache is high, the chance of it being in neither is extremely low.

Re:Before-After comparison somewhere??

[toesate]

Front page comparison,

Before [google.com] link,
After [google.com] link.

Re:Good!

[Steve Newall]

They still have tabs on some of the (lesser used?) international home pages, such as Swedish Chef [google.com], and Swahili [google.com]

Re:About Face!

[mike2R]

One thing I like about Google is, while they put their searchers first, they also maintain very good relations with advertisers and site owners in general.

See this thread [webmasterworld.com] at WebMasterWorld - the Google rep is called GoogleGuy.

Re:Meanwhile...

[NeoThermic]

I just tried it. Yes, I agree, great if you use a text based browser, or have low bandwidth. But for usage? Seems backwards.

But gave me a thought. Why not use the text only interface, shove some CSS over it, and make the page look like the bloated HTML code version. Thus, you could make /. XHTML and CSS rather than bloated HTML.

NeoThermic

directories

[VanillaCoke420]

The link to the directories should've been left on the first page.

The one time I DON'T press preview...

[ChimaObialo]

That's what I get for trying too hard.

Directory [google.com]
University [google.com]
.Gov [google.com]
Linux [google.com]
Mac [google.com]
BSD [google.com]
Mircosfot [google.com]

Re:That has been around..and here it is!

[celerityfm]

Taadaaaa! [blogspace.com] -- I think the new look started showing up randomly for people in December and the whole bookmark exploit started showing up late February.

Interesting.

Re:Fake hits

[Tarqwak]

> For some searches you just get pages and pages of hits from "directory" sites...

Then do your part and Report a Spam Result [google.com].

Not new!

[Plutor]

This isn't new, Google has been tracking (some) clicks for years. Not everyone will see it for the same reason that not everyone has seen the new interface for the last couple of months: depending on the unique 'visitor id' in your Google preferences cookie, you may or may not.

As for the gloom-and-doom, IMHO this is totally benign. Google is most likely using these statistics to do usability testing ("How many links do people need to click on for this search to get what they're looking for?") or algorithm tweaking (actually using click-thrus as an input for PageRank).

They've been testing this publicly for a while.

[gr]

It popped up randomly [livejournal.com] based on a randomly set cookie [blogspace.com]. You could also switch it on manually in preferences for maybe about a month now.

Calculator

[dom1234]

Have you noticed the calculator [google.ca] ? Quite cool !

Google Personalized Search

[Vexware]

This is a sad day for the Internet: Google has truely shot itself in the foot. Where are the big banner ads? the pop-ups? Where are the unrelated search results, obfuscated by even more unrelated "sponsored" search "results"? And why is it useful? It's the sad truth, but alas Google is living in the past, instead of looking to the future. (- Insert obligotary "BSD is dead" parody here -)

Seriously though, wandering around on ZDNet [zdnet.com], I found that Google has launched a personalized search engine [google.com]. I tried it out, and I'll tell you what -- it kicks major ass. Let's say you are trying to look up information for a particular or specialized search term on the traditional Google, it may give you some random unrelated results, those of another domain you wish to consult about; on Google Personalized Search, you specify which domain you want to search about and it will provide you with more pertinent results. Kudos to Google, once again.

They are even cleaner!

[yudan]

Look at Altavista [altavista.com] now by yourself, you'll see how clean it is NOW. AltaVista means "a view from above". It is developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1995 in its Palo Alto research labs. (This is the reason you see DEC ads in its 1998 version [archive.org]) However, it was bought by Overture several years ago, which in turn was bought by Yahoo. Its database has been merged with that of AlltheWeb.

Re:About Face!

[sglane81]

For those of you who didn't get that, he took out the spaces in the JavaScript.

Why not go the whole route like Yahoo did years ago and have NO linebreaks too? That would definitly save space. However, nothing saves spaces like writing proper code and using styles.

Re:Meanwhile...

[Patik]

Or add "ads.osdn.com" to your HOSTS file and never even load 99% of the ads.

Re:Popup?

[jasonsfa98]

Get firebird and middle click :-) or Click preferences (on google.com) and choose "open in new window" duh!

Re:Definition

[.com b4 .storm]

And if you search for define:something (like define:taoism), Google will gather definitions of that term from pages around the web. Handy if you are looking for a quick overview of what a term means in actual use, rather than in the dictionary.

huh ???

[Anonymous Coward]

Google updated IT'S face?

Please. Could we get people who attended school beyond the second grade to post stories?

I'd hope that by now, everyone would know "it's" means "it is" and "its" is a possessive.

Let's hope this idiot doesn't spell this way on hi's (doesn't that look stupid?) resume.

Re:Popup?

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to Google's preferences [google.com] and click the box next to "Open search results in a new browser window."

Interface vs. Implementaiton Simplicity

[The boojum]

Before it was a simplistic search engine

Erm... I think the submitter was mistaking interface simplicity for implementation/functional simplicity. Google's a brilliant example of interface simplicity, but I doubt it's nearly so simple behind the facade. They also seem to nicely follow the rule of least suprise.

Re:Fatal Error

[1110110001]

You use HTTP to transmit your stylesheet. So the HTTP RFC [uci.edu] helps.

b4n

Re:About Face!

[cardshark2001]

If you're so smart, how come you put your periods after closing quotation marks?

Look here [commnet.edu].

Putting punctuation inside of quotation marks is an American convention, but the British put them outside. I use a combination of the two styles, depending on the circumstances. If I quoting something directly, I will put the punctuation on the inside. Sometimes the American way of punctuating doesn't make any sense. For instance, take the following sentence:

Did she say "That woman is ugly"?

It doesn't make sense to put the punctuation inside of the quote, because the quotation was not itself a question.

Granted, I should probably try to stick to one style or the other for consistency's sake, but it's really correct either way.

Re:Meanwhile...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not Mozilla/Firefox; it's Slashdot.

It occasionally sends HTML that's just completely wrong, and Mozilla doesn't guess at what the page is supposed to look like. It simply displays what it was given. Fixing this would require getting Mozilla to guess at things it really has no business guessing at.

There was a story [alistapart.com] demonstrating a cleaned-up version of Slashdot using valid XHTML 1.0, and sure enough it doesn't exhibit these table problems.

Re:Revolution

[RedWizzard]

A simple search on "Dupont Circle" named after got this [exploredc.org] page as the first hit. From the page:

Dupont Circle epitomizes Pierre L'Enfant's vision of a city of grandeur, greenness and grace. Here, three grand avenues named after original states -- Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire -- meet at a landscaped circle in the center of which is a large marble fountain. Designed in 1921 by Daniel Chester French and Henry Bacon, the designers of the Lincoln Memorial, the fountain replaced a statue of Rear Admiral Samuel Francis du Pont, a Civil War naval hero.

Note I didn't get any obvious DuPont Chemical hits by simply searching for "Dupont Circle" or including Washington in the query.
Perhaps you should question your own search skills rather than Google's engine?