Google Give Searchers 'Instant Previews' of Result Pages 252
First pressing 'Enter' was to much work... now actually clicking on the links and visiting the sites is to much, too... Google is testing instant previews, where you can see a miniature rendered view of the landing page without requiring you to click through and back-arrow.
There's only one upgrade needed for Google (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's to turn off Javascript, which returns it to the original, clean, doesn't-suck-donkey-dick home page with a box to type in the search term and a couple of buttons to click.
-1 Please No! (Score:5, Insightful)
The instant search results are a pain for me. They violate my back button expectations and they interfere with my web searching workflow: I may alter my query in preperation for the next iteration while still scanning the page for links to open in new tabs.
It also uses excessive bandwidth by searching for me--and causing the page scrollbar to jump around jarringly--when I am not done typing.
One thing I always liked about Google right from the first is that they're *lightweight* and fast. Clutter free and minimal to the greatest extent possible. I understand with things like the never-ending-image-search and instant results from queries they're trying to compete with the glitz of bing and other so-called competitors, but this seriously hurts the experience for users like me. Please, Google! You don't have to compete on glitz when you have a hands-down superior product!
Enough already!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Dammit, all I want is simple search. I don't want previews, or weighted results, or guessing what I really meant, or a map and pictures and previews of everything that happens to come up in the list of results. Just give me the damned plain search and the naked results. Stop wasting my time with YOUR idea of what YOU think I wanted.
Oh wait, that should be "What your ADVERTISERS think I wanted". My mistake.
Google got popular because it was SIMPLE and FAST. It's a damned shame there's no competition left that believes in simple search, so now even Google feels free to tell us how WE want to search.
What the search world needs is a reset, back to what Google was like when it was new and still eager to collect more eyeballs, instead of the 800 pound gorilla that dictates how every web page is optimized and which ones we get to see when we go looking for something.
Re:-1 Please No! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:There's only one upgrade needed for Google (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also annoying as hell to revise the query only to have that dropdown appear, obscuring part of the page.
Personally, especially at work, I don't want Google pulling up any random page from search results on my behalf.
Stop trying to think for us, and be what Google originally was - simple, lightweight, doing only what I need and nothing more.
Just stop it! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:There's only one upgrade needed for Google (Score:3, Insightful)
Yep, that does cure most of what ails it. But 1) most people don't know how to do this, and 2) it's a damned nuisance even tho I can do it with one tick of a checkbox.
And then you've got to turn it back on to get any useful behaviour from Google Maps, tho they've become so cumbersome of late that I'd welcome suggestions of where I'd find something like it used to be, with the map, sat, and terrain views, but not every damned gadget in the world making it so damned slow that it's easier to go find my paper maps.
Same with Translate.
Why fix what is not broken? I'm going to hate it! (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't like the feature, on Google, that moves an indicator when I press my arrow keys and lets me (forces me to) select the link with the enter key. I use my arrow keys for scrolling, not for navigation within the embedded HTML. I have a strong feeling I'm not going to like this either.
Remember when Google won us all over with their simplistic no frills search results? Why do people feel the need to fix what is not broken??
Nick Powers
Re:Not only useless but also distracting (Score:3, Insightful)
Improving the snippets of website text, shown in normal results, would be much more useful than this visual, well, gimmick.
Easy too - simply by allowing more text to be shown (technically easy at least, because I guess we would get more "Google is stealing from us!" a'la Murdoch)
PS. Option of bigger (say, two to three line, configurable) snippets would be useful in Slashdot D2, too.
Re:"But I didn't actually VISIT that page" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:-1 Please No! (Score:3, Insightful)
NoScript has google.com whitelisted because a lot of things I do make this necessary.
Re:Sometimes competition isn't so good (Score:4, Insightful)
Click "Instant Is On", click "Off". Tadaa! You're right back to the 'good old days'.
Personally, i thought Instant was jarring and annoying at first, but I decided to give it a couples days to get used to it. Turns out I think it's actually pretty nice, if nothing else it lets you change your queries on the fly, adding more keywords if necessary to narrow down your search by just continuing to type.
Re:Enough already!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Google got popular because it was SIMPLE and FAST.
You're missing something. It was simple and fast, and gave results head and shoulders above those returned by the competition. Now, it's true that the competition had given up on getting better results and was instead working on trying to make money off of you while it tried to convince you you didn't want to leave the site anyway (so never mind those search results anyway -- please stay at our "portal"). But Google did more than just minimalism. Suddenly, the Internet was useful, because you could find what you needed, even if it was on some obscure page.
And how did Google make that work so well? Well, precisely by doing what you're worried about: organizing the results in a way which matches their algorithm's guess as to the most helpful response for your query.
After all, there's always been wget -r and grep.
Re:Enough already!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, no. At the time Google's results were not particularly better, and were decidedly worse than some of the established search tools (I remember running some comparisons back when Google was the new kid on the block).
It took a couple years to peel me off the ones I'd been using, because it took that long for Google's results to catch up. And that was about the time the others went for the irritating "portal" interface, which was FAR too damned slow for those of us who were still stuck on dialup.
But Google worked in any browser and on even the slowest connection, and was never in-your-face like a portal. And perhaps most important, thanks to its simple interface Google was so fast, both to come up and for results, that if an initial search was useless you didn't feel like you'd wasted your time, you'd just try again.
And now Google has given up trying to give you better results, and is concentrating on trying to make money off of you by being everything you'll ever need ... oh, wait. Haven't we seen this movie before??
Re:Enough already!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Ummm....actually Google got popular by making things that were their idea of what people wanted.
Re:There's only one upgrade needed for Google (Score:4, Insightful)
I only log in on PCs I trust and use regularly.
Re:There's only one upgrade needed for Google (Score:5, Insightful)
It's annoying I think to most people in a way that is hard to describe. It's like speaking to a person who always tries to finish your sentences before you're done speaking.
Re:There's only one upgrade needed for Google (Score:1, Insightful)
To summarize the first few posts to this thread:
"Whine whine whine although I read Slashdot I'm actually a luddite who hates all new ideas ever in software whine whine whine the UI should remain the exact same as it was in 1975 damnit or it's crap whine whine whine."
Seriously, why do Slashdot readers hate change so much? Is there a class you all went to ("Get Off My Lawn 101") that I missed out on?
Re:It's automation, not laziness! (Score:5, Insightful)
But in this case you need a machine and an internet connection, and not inconsiderable muscle built into both.
The point of the enter button was that you could construct your query, send it once, and let the big iron at google do all the work for you, instead of plowing all the intermediate results into your battery- and bandwidth-challenged device.
So while Google is meeting your goal of automating repetitive tasks, it's also making work for itself, mostly just to impress you, but costing you more than you think in the process.
Google must be a consultant.
Re:It's automation, not laziness! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's automation, not laziness! (Score:3, Insightful)
But in this case you need a machine and an internet connection, and not inconsiderable muscle built into both.
But at some point you too must realise that it is no longer 1995. It's like all the arguments that Google became popular because it was simple and it was fast. Well yes I also cherished simplicity and speed when my 56k modem was kicking in the turbos just to load my results. These days a large part of the world is absorbing bandwidth via youtube videos over ADSL2 if they're lucky, and you know what? Google still seems just as fast to me now, except even easier to use and faster to parse results.
If you're worried maybe you should see the headline at the top of slashdot right now: "Dutch ISP Demos Symmetric 100Mbps DOCSIS3"