Google Recipes! Google Careers! Google Confusion! The UI Madness Continues
Item 3
on my 25 Things I
Hate About Google list was “Stop confusing people. Pick a user interface and
go with it!” The past few days only prove my point, as I’ve seen everything from
Google Recipes to Google Careers being reported as new features while others
play with their cookies in order to get a green bar vertical search
implementation.
Look, it’s
Google Real Estate!
Actually, it’s just results from Google Base that are now flowing into the
regular results through a
OneBox display. Google
said
when Google Base launched that results would get integrated into regular Google.
Look, it’s Google
Recipes!
Look, it’s
Google Careers!
Nope, once again, it’s just Google Base results flowing into the regular
results. It’s the same thing as with the real estate listing integration above,
but it’s confusing to those who come across these listings because Google’s not
given any heads-up about the new implementation.
Here’s the Official Google Base
Blog. See any mentions? Nada. Would it be so hard to explain that Google is
more heavily testing integrating Google Base results into regular Google for
randomly selected searchers? How about throwing up a few screenshots to
illustrate it? Maybe put an experimental feature on
Google Labs letting anyone who wants this
to try it.
Nah, that would be too easy. Instead, let’s just have people get all confused
about what the hell is going on.
It could be this is part of a grand Google master plan. The beta strategy
already works well for that double-dip of publicity. Put the product out in
beta, gather up the glory, then release it from beta for that second dose of
write-ups. Perhaps these non-disclosed alpha experiments are a way to triple
team the coverage. Get the buzz going as a select few see these experiments and
blog about them. Then do a beta. Then a final. Then move into Redmond and take
over Microsoft and….
Personally, I think it’s just lameness rather than a clever business
strategy. Google’s long tested new features by showing them select groups of
people. When I’ve asked them why they don’t disclose this testing more, it’s
always been a case of not wanting to mess up the “experiment” by skewing the
sample.
Googlers, those days are long gone. In a world of bloggers, keeping your
experiments quiet are over. For example, take the “news” of Google “new
interface,” as Ars Technica
called it
this week. Which new interface would that be? There are so many to choose from.
Honestly, as I said in my 25 Hates piece, I wish I had the time to Photoshop
everything we’ve seen so far into a singular illustration of the Google to come.
In the meantime, here’s a bulletpoint recap:
It seems to have
started
last August with the results preceded by a “Dissatisfied? See results for:”
message. It soon changed to a “See results for” message
later than
month.
Today, it continues on, happening for some people but not all of them and
still generating plenty of confusion. I know this firsthand, because hardly a
week goes by without someone posting in our Search Engine Watch Forums for
help/information/confirmation that Google’s doing this. We have a standing
thread
on the topic, created by merging multiple posts over time. Despite that,
here’s someone
posting
about it afresh yesterday.
The feature came under new discussion this month when it suggested results for
“ashley cole gay” in response to queries for Ashley Cole, a UK footballer.
Google “Ashley
Cole Gay” Results Suggestion Prompts Questions From His Solicitor covers
more about this.
What do the Google help pages say about this feature? Nothing. Here’s the
guide to Google’s search results page. This feature doesn’t get mentioned
there. If you’re trying to figure out why this happens (as Ashley Cole’s
solicitor was), you’re stuck with the official
comment
Google gave me back in August (it’s a test) or Google’s Matt Cutts
explaining
a bit more on his personal blog. Suffice to say, an official mention somewhere
on Google itself at this point wouldn’t be amiss.
And isn’t that great? Now Google’s got people all over the web possibly
screwing up their cookies to see this experiment. It’s all probably pretty safe
— if not, I’m sure someone would be screaming security concerns by now. But
there’s an overriding security concern that it’s probably not a great idea that
people are pasting JavaScript code into their browsers period. Next time, it
could be some adware/spyware thing changing Google’s search results (as they
have in the past), but people might think it’s another super-secret Google
experiment and begin merrily hacking away (and getting infected) to see what’s
up.
Solutions?