Google Maps search suggestions suck.

Google Search suggestions are supposed to help you search faster, not clutter your space with a bunch of irrelevant search terms. While suggestions have worked well for Google Search and Google Image Search, they have proved a complete failure with Google Maps.

First of all, people already know what they’re looking for when they go to maps.google.com, especially if they’re trying to find a specific address. However, the suggestions just have to get in the way and display five totally irrelevant suggestions. I could imagine how suggestions would be useful when searching for a business like “pizza near chicago il”, but that’s one of the few times it’s only slightly useful.

So, Dear Google, please turn off Google Maps search suggestions. Thanks.

goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com is better than google.com

That, my friends, is http://www.goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle.com/ , aka G56ogle.com. It’s Google, but themed. Unlike Google’s themes which only allow you to select a photo that makes the homepage blind your eyes, G56ogle.com has pre-made themes that look just awesome. And yes, G56ogle.com uses Google, although it doesn’t have the same features. It’s still worth a try though.

Google redesigns itself, Part 2 [REBLOG]

Regarding my post yesterday about Google Search’s new interface, Google had some things to say about its new design:

This post was originally written by Jon Wiley. It was posted on the Official Google Blog here. The post has been edited for this blog by Deathgleaner.

The Google design, turned up a notch

5/06/2010 12:30:00 PM

This week we introduced our latest update to search, and I wanted to share a bit of our thinking on the design team. In short, we tried to take all the things we strive for at Google and make them better: powerful technology, snappy results, simplicity and a fun and quirky personality. Our goal was to take a design known by millions of people and make it better. As a designer, it’s hard to think of a more exciting challenge.

During our process we focused on people’s rising expectations for search. As the web has evolved over the past decade, people have been typing more sophisticated searches and seeking out specialized search tools to match. To keep pace with rapid change online, we have teams of engineers working across Google to develop new ways to present and refine search results. Our central challenge with our latest redesign was to figure out how to squeeze all these tools and technologies into a single page.

A common way to expand the flexibility of a website has been to add a left-hand panel of links, often referred to by designers as a “left-hand nav.” We’ve been creating mocks of left-hand panels since the earliest days of Google and have tested these designs with users as far back as 2006. Overall, we’ve found they can provide a great way to navigate without getting in the way of the main content, but they can also be distracting. Our users want more powerful tools, but they also want the simplicity they’ve come to expect from Google.

As a first step towards finding that balance, we introduced the Search Options panel last May, including a toggle to open and close. This way we could quickly try out new search tools, such as refinements by time and content types. Using the lessons from Search Options, designers, researchers and engineers worked side-by-side to explore a vast array of possibilities for a permanently open panel of search tools. We made hundreds of prototypes and gathered feedback from user studies, Googlers and through experiments — including one of our largest visible experiments ever. In the end, we came up with a design that provides dynamic, relevant search tools on the left, while lightening and updating the aesthetics all around. Here’s a picture of the Search Options panel (left) and our new results page (right):

We knew that adding a left-hand panel would inevitably add some weight to the results page, so we took a number of steps to lighten other aspects of the design. The overall visual redesign started with the Google logo. Here’s an image comparing the old logo (top) and the new logo (bottom):

The new logo is lighter, brighter and simpler. We took the very best qualities of our design — personality and playfulness — and distilled them. The logo was the foundation for new icons and hundreds of tiny alterations designed to accommodate and seamlessly integrate the expanded functionality of the left-hand panel. For example, we lightened up the footer at the bottom of the page by removing the blue shading and the underlines on the links, lightening the color and expanding the search box. Here’s a picture of the old footer (top) compared with the new (bottom):

While I’m very happy about our latest improvements, a designer’s work is never done. We’re already testing additional refinements and we’ll continue to listen to all of you as we work to continue making search better.

If you’re curious, here are some of the other design prototypes we tried (you might have to click to magnify some of these images):

1. Blue homepage: We’ve always had a strong affinity for blue — after all, blue is usually the color of web links, so it binds the web together. It became the basis for many designs.
2. Blue button: The big blue button made it all the way to our first external experiment, where it was promptly rejected by users. We heard you loud and clear and changed the button in the next round.
3. Universal bars: This design emphasizes different types of results with labeled blocks in the main results pane, such as books, news and shopping.
4. Blue results: This is one of the final blue designs we created and marks the point when we renamed the “Web” link to “Everything” — a label that gets closer to the intent of our mission to organize all the world’s information.

Posted by Jon Wiley, Senior User Experience Designer

End reblog

Here’s some interesting quotes I found while reading this:

• “During our process we focused on people’s rising expectations for search. As the web has evolved over the past decade, people have been typing more sophisticated searches and seeking out specialized search tools to match.” About the sidebar that Google has just introduced, I’m inferring that Bing and Yahoo! did this out of user expectations. Finally, Google steps up to other users’ expectations.
• “In the end, we came up with a design that provides dynamic, relevant search tools on the left, while lightening and updating the aesthetics all around.” What Google had before was a collapsible search options sidebar. Now, they make it visible with less clutter.

Apparently, Google also had more redesigns than I thought, including the bluification of its search: “We’ve always had a strong affinity for blue — after all, blue is usually the color of web links, so it binds the web together. It became the basis for many designs.”

Thanks for finally realizing our needs, Google.

Google redesigns itself

It’s not just the search interface that’s redesigned, even the Google logo has been given an extra coat of gloss. Look at the before and after:

Before:

After:

Look closely and you’ll see the differences. Actually, the Google logo on the homepage itself hasn’t changed, but on the Images, Video, etc. pages it has.

Now about the main part of Google Search’s redesign: the search itself. Look at the new design:

It’s absolutely clear that this is a much friendlier interface and is much neater. Now I can finally breathe.

But wait, doesn’t the layout look quite familiar? Perhaps you’ve used Yahoo! or Bing. Let’s take a look at that…

…and Bing:

Notice anything? They all have similar sidebars! Looks like Google finally responded to Bing (and Yahoo) and advanced their search.

Google Search gets wider

A while ago, Google decided to make it’s search box wider. I found out through a tweet from Mashable (here.)

I’m not sure how I like the widened search box. All of a sudden, Google’s “minimalistic” search page has gotten a lot more disproportionate. The Google logo looked much better the way it was before with a smaller text entry area and smaller buttons. However, it emphasizes on the fact that the Search is Google’s main function.

On Mashable.com, there was a blog post about it, which is reblogged here.

This post first appeared on Mashable.com under the title Google Goes Looooooooonger, Supersizes Its Search Box. It was written on September 9th, 2009 by Barb Dybwad, and has been edited by Deathgleaner for publication on this blog.

What’s better than a search box with two buttons? A bigger search box with two buttons, says Google.

Today the search giant implemented and announced a subtle but noticeable change to the size of the search text field on the Google home page: it’s bigger. It also features a larger font size as you type in the field, with correspondingly larger text for Google Suggest results below (that are occasionally good for a laugh).

The company says the reason behind the change is to remind us that Google’s focus is on search. That’s a relief, because with that smaller text box in place before, we just weren’t sure.

The change is interesting in light of Google’s recent patent on its minimalist homepage interface… that the company is now changing. Of course, it’s not the first time Google has tweaked the homepage, and if you’re interested, here’s a slideshow timeline showing off the various changes through the years.

What do you think: does a larger textbox make the search engine more “fun to use”? Or if we hadn’t told you, would you even have noticed?