Google’s Search Results Ditch Underlined Links, Increase Font Size | Hacker News Reader

Google’s Search Results Ditch Underlined Links, Increase Font Size

techcrunch.com

37 pointsanigbrowl45 comments

Google making meaningless changes in the direction of minimalism like always. I find the google search of today no more usable or intuitive than that of 10 years ago. Minimalism is such a plague. It assumes people can't deal with the mildest hint of non-mission-critical information on the screen, which is false, or at least it used to be; if it catches on too much people's minds might get so rotted that they get confused navigating a web page with more than two buttons. Arguments about "visual noise" are such bumpkis. We've been good at dealing with visual noise forever, before computers, before civilization.

I find the google search of today no more usable or intuitive than that of 10 years ago.

Do you find it any less usable, though?

We've been good at dealing with visual noise forever, before computers, before civilization.

Then we should be good at dealing with Google results without underlines too, right?

Its usability has gone down a bit. http://teacheralanblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/2004.j... Now some of those links are hidden behind that vague square button thing at the top-right. It took me a while at first to figure out that's supposed to be like a phone's app screen and thus that's where you find the rest of the apps. It was better as a text link that said "More applications" or something. The current square thing doesn't even invite me to try clicking on it; it looks nothing like a button.

The lack of underlines doesn't really impact the usability at all except that it's an unneeded change that some are going to find jarring. Looking at google results myself now, it feels "off". That's a lot more "distracting" than the presence of admittedly not really necessary underlines. But change for its own sake, especially in UI, does more harm than good often.

I have to say, the little yellow "Ad" badge actually jumps out at me a lot more clearly than the colored background.

It doesn't seem like that should be the case, but I felt my eyes hitting the Ad badges and more easily filtering the ads from the search results.

Already found user scripts to revert to the old-style results [1].

I also found a user script to conveniently put the search options on the left-hand side again. It saves me two clicks when I limit the date range of the search results. (I had to tweak the scripts to get them to work in tandem.)

Here's what my Google search results look like, now: [2]

[1] http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/409199

[2] https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/508947/google-userscript...

I used to disable adblock on Google since I didn't find the ads intrusive. However the ads blends right into the results with the new changes, so I'm re-enabling it. Though overall I assume Google will get a revenue boost from their change to the ads.

Blend right in? They have a bright yellow lozenge that says "Ad" next to each result on mine. The ads are even more distinct then they were before.

It's that you can't see the yellow mark, but it's much harder to just skip to the results.

I still don't understand what you mean. Look at this page:

http://gyazo.com/ed84537df50abd7f0d34212a6ba6a497

How long didyou have to look before realizing where the ads stop and the organic results begin? For me it's dead easy...

Note this may be a bad example, because if I'm searching for "insurance", an advertisement for an insurance company is actually a relevant result.

The adds are bigger and a lot less distinguishable as ads. The only thing distinguishing them now is the small "Ad" bubble.

At my screen resolution, about 70% of real estate is now filled with ads. I get an AltaVista deja-vu.

Google, for the record, I used to like your non-invasive, targeted ads, but I now installed AdBlock as a direct result of this change.

OTOH, now your LCD's gamma can't make the ads invisible. My guess is this change makes ads more recognizable because they say the word "ad" on them.

I visited my family over the holidays and was shocked to see that the ad background was completely invisible on their crappy Dell LCDs.

I know the graphic designers have long since won this battle, but I still feel like there's value in underlining links.

Underlined links are discoverable -- it's obvious at a glance that they are links, rather than body text.

Underlined links are noticeable -- they stand out from a sea of non-underlined text, drawing the eye to them.

Underlined links are self-explanatory -- it's obvious what you're supposed to do with them (i.e. click).

These are all valuable UI benefits.

The solutions that most sites that have abandoned underlined links have taken up in their place all have drawbacks compared to the good old underline:

Underlining the link on hover/rollover reduces discoverability -- you don't know for certain whether something's a link or not until you investigate it.

Making links a different color reduces usability for the color-blind; red-blind people have no idea that your red links look different than your black text does.

Making links bold, italic, or a different size all leave the possibility of confusing the link with body text that happens to share the same typographical presentation. (You can underline text too, of course, but that's relatively rare on the Web because of the strong association of underlining with links.)

Nobody cares about this argument anymore, I know, so I don't expect anything to change because of it. I just think it's worth noting that there are good reasons to prefer underlining links that don't boil down to "stuck in 1996".

I feel a similarity between this and infiniscroll, without trying to draw false parallels. Whenever each comes up, I find myself asking "but why do I even want this?". It feels like a bunch of people trying to iterate on techniques for the sake of iterating on techniques.

I have some slight equivocation with myself over the above, after having written it; since it seems to lead the question "isn't almost everything just iterating until a breakthrough", but to be pragmatic, I have to draw a line somewhere before I start shaving yaks, and perpetually tweaking how I look at "THIS REFERS TO SOMETHING SOMEWHERE ELSE" seems to be getting quite four legged and fuzzy, so I'll leave it in.

(to be more productive about this all, if a UI designer wants to try and make a compelling argument for "why I want this", I'd certainly give it the time of day)

When we're complaining about UX changes in Google Search anyway: i really miss the old left-hand side menu with search filters, especially with image search. They've hidden it under 'search tools' where it takes more clicks and it's a lot less visible than the old way.

For links buried within copy, I agree.

For a list of search results where you know every entry is a hyperlink? Pure visual noise and I'm glad it's gone.

I agree. As long time UX watchdog in many of the companies I work for (interaction designer/developer) I always want to see links underlined if they are inside a larger body of text. Menus and link lists? Not as big of a deal as long as it's still consistent with establish interaction patterns of the whole project.

First time I met this 'new' design, I thought it was a rendering bug[0]. Next time I understood it was testing, and I just thought 'why' ? Google seems desperate to find things to tweak while ignoring things that I find obvious:

  - right click event turns the url in a trackable monstrosity [1]
  - shortened url can't be copied [2]
  - no, sharing doesn't only mean 'publish on g+'
  - filters could be made faster [3]
  - g+ has comment notifications, gmail has nothing

[1] facebook => https://encrypted.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=facebook&sourc... and

[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.....

[3] instead of submenus that pops at opposite side, toggle buttons for instance year|month|week , or local|global . The old right side vertical list was better (even though lacking features).

[0] Chromium had some issues on my platform (or maybe just my distro) recently

A personal anecdote: I was an avid youtube user, but their nearly ceaseless iteration of everything from sidebar contents to full on page layouts and link availability (I remember a time when one could go from the video listing of one channel belonging to one user directly to another channel's usable video links. This now takes 2-3 clicks, depending on your definition of usable.) has me at a point where I get frustrated when I have to use the service, and am actively looking to migrate off of it.

Soundcloud has almost entirely replaced youtube for me in the music sense, the problem seems to be that there's no video service "core" enough that "everyone" uploads "everything" to it. A lot of handwaving there, but youtube has a certain amount of critical mass in that area, AFAIK. (if I'm living in a little google bubble, I'd appreciate other video services, but I feel like I'm aware of most of the main ones ala vimeo, and as I said, critical mass.)

Note: I feel like google treats most of their services like this. I personally have felt nothing but decreased usability since the not-TOO-far-removed-from-pure-html days of gmail. (The pinnacle for me was shortly after the integration of gchat and the polish that came after, but before the great whitespace apocalypse.)

Everything you wrote resonnates with my experience.

Youtube still gets my love because of the amount of obscure old songs you can find there (forgotten videos, LP). AFAIK SoundCloud is full obscure recent songs :)

> - no, sharing doesn't only mean 'publish on g+'

I sympathize with the feeling, but do you really expect them to drive people to their competitors? Do you think Facebook's Share button should allow you to Publish on G+ as well?

Good point, I forgot was logged in, and judge google.com as a public page (unlike facebook primary essence). Logged off, the `share` option is gone. But that remark was in the context of mangled URLs. I can't right-click, double click nor select to get the URL and pass it along. Very broken IMO even though I understand they want me to visit said page.

Yeah, honestly, at most places I work this would never fly because we support people with disabilities and that means having more than just color indicate something is a clickable link. There are even laws forcing this, ADA, for government and education.

Personally, I think they should at least make the summary clickable if they are going to do this.

I use xScope [1] to simulate seven types of colorblindness. The blue titles are distinctive in every simulation. Does xScope miss something? Or are you assuming that blue is not distinctive because most colors are not distinctive?

[1] https://iconfactory.com/software/xscope

At risk of sounding heartless, catering to the lowest common denominator sucks. Like supporting IE6-level suckiness. There is more than enough information available in markup for accessibility software to override design choices.

>Making links a different color reduces usability for the color-blind; red-blind people have no idea that your red links look different than your black text does.

Either you have no idea what it means to be colorblind or you are talking about an extremely small percentage of all colorblind people.

From an article in 2004 that is still very much relevant today:

Underlined blue text is still the most obvious visual indicator of a link

...and more...

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/guidelines-for-visualizing-l...

seriously??? My 12 year old daughter could spot a hyperlink from a hundred yards without the ugly underlining. She told me "it's obvious". Links are inferred by their placement, you click on google search results more than a couple of times and you learn. Humans figured out fire, the wheel, perspective and now space travel so I really don't think the lack of underline is really going to dent anyone's web experience. People keep saying the same old nonsense that underlining helps them discover etc, but come on... seriously, if you really believe that you're in the wrong place.

"Nobody cares about this argument anymore" - finally I agree with you.

The bolding of search terms sure seems like it would be a good idea, but it is very distracting to me.

Same here, I hate it. Perhaps it's just resistance to change, but have been acutely conscious of seeing less information (due to the larger font size) the last few days and feel less inclined to search iteratively.

I find the bold search terms useful and interesting to identify when Google has performed any sort or fuzzy match (synonym, acronym, etc). For some obscure searches, knowing that a fuzzy match is affecting the results might cue me to refine the search with quotes to bring more relevant or precise results to the top.

Maybe I just need to get better at Googling.

If you hadn't mentioned I wouldn't have noticed. Guess underlines aren't all that significant an indicator of being a link to me anymore. That or Google's design works as intended.

well, no, not for a list of links that you know in advance is going to be a list of links. Body copy is another matter.

Wikipedia doesn't underline links either. They're doing fine.

I imagine this will lead to more ad clicks since people know by now that the peach background means that's an ad.

Also, it makes more sense to go to the real source: http://searchengineland.com/googles-new-look-search-results-... which has covered this many times before.

I actually find the redesign makes it more obvious what is an ad and what isn't. nothing beats a descriptive labels that tells it like it is, and the subtle background color can vary hugely from monitor to monitor such that it's barely visible on some.

And this is what scares me. Google ads are just plain dangerous. If they removed the malicious results this wouldn't be such a problem, but turn off your ad blocker and search for VLC.

Your top result will be malware and that's what most of my friends click. Any step to further disguise ads is a step further in this malware propagating itself.

No ads when searching for [vlc] here.

Thanks for the link. I didn't go to SearchEngineLand because the change was evident enough that I assumed multiple writers were commenting on it in parallel rather than taking their cue from that article.

I have noticed this for the past few weeks. I guess I am in their test group. It's definitely a step backward from the previous version. At first I thought it was a change to the spacing. It's hard to really see the delineation between results, it all just merges together. It makes it harder to scan the results for the desired one.

I personally quite enjoy the look, however I find the general inefficient use of screen real estate annoying. There is so much unused white space on the right hand side of search results.

What do you want there? More results? Ads? Something else slowing down page load times?

Google wants to deliver relevant results, and fast. Anything else is just slowing them down.

More horizontal text from the search results would be nice, this would allow you to read / skim the results slightly quicker

Maybe I am just older and grumpier every day but every UI change Google does be it Hangouts, Youtube, Gmail, Maps and now Search make their services less attractive and less comfortable to use. I like underlined links. It was easier to distinguish between actual links, descriptions and ads. Now it take more focus from me to just skim the results looking for the right one. Sucks!

This has been bothering me for the past few days. Broke my extension to hide results in google (w3schools.)

The ads are also bigger, no?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com