Saturday, February 01, 2014

Can Google's engineers be stupid? Dynamic search type order.


This started a few days ago. I often use the image search by clicking "Images" link when I cannot find  the page I want among large amount of web pages hits. As usual, I clicked the Images link but the result look weird. Wait a minute... they are video thumbnails! Then I found that the search type was "Videos" not "Images". A few moments later, I saw news results when I clicked the Images link. Finally I figured it out: the search type order changes according to the keyword.

Maybe Google engineers thought they found a new cool, helpful feature, but this is really annoying. And as I found in the Google Products forum, many users hate it too. The search type links are all in text: Web, Images, News.... You know what? People do not like reading text on their monitor unless they really have to, because reading is a lot more brain-power consuming than just seeing an image is. Many uses, I believe, just clicks the position as they remember. Dynamic rearrange makes it impossible to click the search type without reading the text each and every single time. And sometimes it shows bad types first. For example, for some keyword "Shopping" comes next to the "Web", when what I really want is the images.

Why not add an icon for each type of search link? And why is there "More" drop down, when there is so much empty space on the right?

4 comments: