Google Image Search gets new interface
Web January 24th, 2007If you haven’t heard by now, Google Image Search has a new interface. All of the technical information is hidden via javascript until you mouse over the image. People have their own opinions about this, but I hate it. Part of the way I qualify an image as useful or not is its dimensions - basically, I’d rather have a 500×500-sized image than a 50×50 of the same thing. To do this now, you have to mouse over every image to check, instead of being able to do it at a glance.
Google really isn’t known for doing these types of ‘do it because we can’ type stylings, and it’s a little disappointing. I understand the desire to have a clean-looking interface, and that maybe the bulk of their users don’t care about the technical data, but at least just grey it out or something, instead of hiding the whole thing.
If you really want to, you can still see Image Search the old way by turning javascript off, but why would you want to do that? Maybe this could become part of a new feature for your google account - so you can choose whether or not to display extended data? Like how WinXP shows tiled view by default in a folder, but you can choose ‘detailed’? Seems like you should probably allow the people to get what they want, instead of forcing one design on everyone…
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January 24th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
But the extended data is what makes it useful! Why would you take that away?
I use the extended data to decide whether or not a picture is worht lookign further into. Now i have to hover my mouse over all of the pictures! Nightmare
January 25th, 2007 at 1:39 am
An update is a positive change to a website. If there is no positive change to be made, there is no need to update. I cannot describe this as an ‘update’ or a positive change, so why has there been a change at all. This change has hidden the most valuable information (domain and size) and left the innane, unusable information. What on earth is google thinking?
Imagine if they did the same thing to their ‘Web’ search and that only the ‘Title’ information was displayed and the user had to mouseover the link to be able to see the url and cached search matches.
Dumb change google. You just made your interface more labourious.
January 25th, 2007 at 2:13 am
Hey, If I wanted to look at a “clean page” I’d go buy me a blank notebook… Google Image Search is a working tool of primary importance, and its purpose is not to maximize cleanliness; it is to enable you to sift through multiple results in minimal time and with the highest likelihood of finding the content you need. Removing the very useful clues of domain and size, and forcing this one by one hover action, slows down the task considerably with no benefit whatsoever to the user.
They could have - and still may, I hope - give the user the choice of what level of info to display…
February 21st, 2007 at 12:13 pm
[...] still can’t help but wonder why they just don’t give the user the option of having the display they prefer. They’ve got the design for both…offer both? I prefer the old one, but I’m sure [...]