Check the Redesigned Google (With Always-Visible Sidebar) Yourself | Hacker News Reader

Check the Redesigned Google (With Always-Visible Sidebar) Yourself

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36 pointsmixmax25 comments

Personally I think that the logo itself looks more professional. However those bright blue buttons are too much. The old gray buttons were more attractive.

The sidebar, however, is impeccable. The instant and available filtering options are incredibly useful.

Edit:

I just noticed something fascinating. The old Google linked from the SERP through a proxy link which redirected to the actual result. The new Google links directly from the SERP to the result. In other words you can now copy a link from the SERP and have it be the actual address of the result, not just the address of a Google redirect to the result.

Heh. I disagree with you on both counts. Guess it goes to show how varying individual tastes are.

I like the blue buttons. They're very playful, which is what Google wants. I also like that they don't look like ordinary OS X buttons on the Mac anymore. They're tasteful blues, not particularly tacky. I also like the border colors of the search bar.

However, the sidebar seems cluttered to me. The design seems cramped, and I hate the whitespace between the highlighted option and the 1px blue bar on the right. Something also seems off with the top/bottom padding vs. the font size on those buttons. Overall the site feels more cramped and less quietly useful than early Google with its single row of links.

I agree with you on the logo, though. I also like where the "About 128,000,000 results (0.35 seconds)" is positioned, as well as the Advanced Search placement. So half really good, half bleh.

Perhaps it's the color. Blue buttons like that spell "microsoft" to me. I hate them.

About 5 years ago, I noticed that links in my Google search results one day were being forwarded through Google before sending me off to the desired web site. I hypothesized that if I visited a search result, then clicked the back button very quickly, then visited another page in those same results, but this time didn't return to Google, that it would cause Google to think that page wasn't useful for that search query, while the second page was. Turns out I was right, because a few days later the first page moved down in the results, and the other one moved up (I had searched for an obscure mathematical concept, and my professor's page was the top result, and it had later swapped places with the second place result.) Thanks for letting me know Google still incorporates how much time a user spends visiting each search result into their formulas.

I had always theorized that they did this, but the point of what I said is that I don't think they are anymore, at least not unless they are reporting it via AJAX or something.

The links on the SERP now go directly to the source without going through the redirect. They are probably doing away with that previous system because it is too vulnerable to scamming, for example getting a bunch of people to click and then back out of the competitor's site so that way you can be on top in the search results.

Thanks. I hadn't seen this behavior for years so you have confirmed they still do it. Secondly, Google did not behave this way every time (in fact, rarely), so not noticing this in the new version doesn't mean Google no longer does this.

> The old Google linked from the SERP through a proxy link which redirected to the actual result. The new Google links directly from the SERP to the result.

It is my understanding that this is always on, but for a random subset of users. If you go drastically changing your cookies (like the instructions here tell you to) you are very likely to change the state of this flag, too.

Okay, that is interesting to know. I guess I had been part of that random subset.

I want searching Google Scholar to have its own button in the sidebar, enabled by default. Most people won't. The sidebar needs to be customizable.

It looks like Bing.

In what way? Bing features pretty landscape photographs both on their main page and along the top of the SERP. Google is still fairly plain text in comparison. Not even the search sidebar operates or looks the same in Bing.

I think he's referring to the sidebar, which is what I noticed right off the bat as well.

I disagree -- the sidebar looks and operates in a similar manner to Bing's. At the very least, they separate the categories of content just like Bing does (All results, images, videos, etc.).

My first thought when I saw this was Bing.

My second thought was that it looks more like Facebook's search with the filter labels on the left: http://www.insidefacebook.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/fac...

My third thought is that I should stop making comparisons. They're just trying to organize the types of search in a way that's usable, and my first assumption shouldn't be that they just ripped it off of another site.

I wrote a UX review of it. http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/

I had to paste the code into the google search field to get this to work in Firefox. If anybody is having trouble getting this to work with the address field, try that.

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I kind of feel bad for google that they got stuck with a semi-crappy logo. That they'll always have to work with it.

In their print work, the artists remove the bevel and drop shadow from the logo and it looks 10x better:

http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/flatgooglelogo

The print logo looks decent but it is still flat and lifeless compared with the vibrant new logo. I think that the new logo (as enabled by turning on this cookie) pops out of the page more and looks more web 2.0 compared with both the original logo and the print logo.

2 things:

1 - didn't work for me when (using firefox 3.5.5)

2 - I have to say that the screenshots look impressive with left-hand column, but in reality the interface will also have a right-hand column for advertisements, which will clutter the interface considerably.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=967237

It's not working for me at all. Am on google.co.in (India) and I also tried switching the domain in the javascript path.. didn't work. I think it's just working in the US... annoying when the posts always fail to tell you about that.

Fully working here in Norway. Just press the "Google.com frontpage"-button on your main Google Search page, and then run the JavaScript.

The new logo looks great. I've been using http://go.infinise.com/ in place of Google for a while because it looks cleaner. Google has approximated this UI much better.

Looks like all of the other crap search engines by Yahoo, MSN, etc.

Why anyone would want to copy those other crap search engine layouts is beyond me. Too much clutter. KISS. (Keep it simple...)

No idea why you were downmodded. I agree. Perhaps an opportunity for a new startup to be the new 'simple search engine that just gives you uncluttered results'.

Is it secure to run this code?

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