With more and more extras being added to search engine results pages, they are starting to look just a little cluttered.
In 2008 Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Products & User Experience, posted an interesting blog post about the Google homepage. The post talked about how Google would receive an occasional email which just contained a number.
It turned out that the number in these emails referred to the number of words present on the Google homepage. Google’s intention was to always keep the homepage simple and the magic number they eventually decided on was 28. Looking at Google today Google.com has 30 words, and that is not including the link "Go to Google UK".
Looking at Google.co.uk, there are 33 words and that is generously not counting "UK kids redesign our logo. Vote for your favourite.", "Go to Google.com" and "Search: the web pages from the UK". Still, I suppose, fairly close to the 28 mark. Google has added another feature recently which would seem to address this. The homepage appears with only the logo, search box and a couple of search buttons. The focus is already on the search box so you can start typing straight away.
If you move the mouse (as I tend to do by habit in order to click on the search box) – the extra links "fade-in".
Yahoo! has never really had a clean homepage being more of a portal that includes search, although you can go straight to http://uk.search.yahoo.com/ and bookmark it rather than being bedazzled (or overwhelmed) by the information overload of the main Yahoo! homepage. Bing has a fairly busy homepage, but I am a sucker for a nice picture.
But it isn’t the homepage’s that I have a problem with – it’s the search results pages.
Over the last few years I can’t help feeling that search engine results pages are getting cluttered. It seems that not a month goes by without one search engine or another announcing a "new feature". Recent changes have been no exception. Bing, for example, blogged about its "next chapter", showcasing new features mainly aimed at travel search that would be rolled out in the near future. And of course Google has been busy too (one such recent feature being the addition of real-time search results).
Take, for example, a search for [Elephant] on Google UK. I’ll use Google as the example here because it’s the most popular search engine. The top two results are for an insurance company. The third result is a link to Wikipedia. After that is an example of what is beginning to annoy me. Next are News Results for Elephant, and then the new all-singing all-dancing real time results, which includes a message from one Twitter user to another "So is the elephant man your father in law?"
So useful, so relevant.
At the bottom of the page are the image results (not, in this case, in the new format with one large image and two rows of smaller ones). No YouTube "Video results though and, as would be expected, no maps. Of course Yahoo! and Bing provide a similar array of "extras" in their results.
My point is that Google, Yahoo! and Bing already provide links at the top of their search results pages for Images, Videos, Maps, News, Shopping and Mail etc. So why could we not have cleaner and simpler results?