Wanted: A new look for Google

All those who are getting a little tired of the lack of things on Google’s pages raise your hands! Now now, c’mon! I know you want to, don’t be shy.

I am quite tired of it to be very honest. Seeing pages like Yahoo's new homepage, or Live.com, it makes me cringe when I have to go to a drab Google page. And unfortunately, it’s not only the search page. Google’s white, a sick green, light sky blue and light red have made their way to every Google service on the web till date. That is the reason I stopped using Docs & Spreadsheet when they removed the beautiful Writely look, Google Reader after I got sick of itIn all fairness, I got sick of Bloglines’ look as well. I opted for the tons better looking, and modestly functional Netvibes over an obvious superior, but downright ugly Bloglines and GReader, and Google.com for my searches after Firefox got it’s own version of the Google.com search page.

A little overdone

I know they became famous of their minimalistic simple design, which was copied by a lot of other sites. It was great for the time it came out, and it works to a limit even now, but I think eventually things should change with time (look at Microsoft and Live.com and Digg). I think this signature Google look has kind of outlived it’s glory.

A look which got 3001 (including mine) diggs is this one, by Andy Rutledge:

And I think it looks ‘much’ better the current one, because it firstly adds much brighter colours, and offers more visual cues than the current one. The other design elements are explained on his page, with a mockup page. This ‘could’ be improved further improved, no doubt. But this is the direction I think Google should be thinking in.

Not enough

There have been silent touches being added to different services, to make them a little more aesthetically pleasing. Like the recent new look of Google Groups, and gentle additions to the Google HomepageThey added (wow!) tabs. But this is not enough. They really need to get their pants up and start to make some serious design decisions. Blogger is the only Google service which looks good. I thought the hiring of Douglas Bowman would open the doors to some much needed visual changes, but it’s been almost a year, and I’m still waiting.

It would be a valid argument if one asked ‘Why fix something which is not broken?’. I’d answer that with the fact that a redesign will bring in more people to use Google services. If you think adding designing elements makes things slow, then you just need to look at Yahoo! Mail. Its new avatar is the perfect proof. Amazingly fast while looking really good. It just depends on what you change and what you add.

It is about time, don’t you think?

Google bloopers caught in screenshots!

Over time and use, we might have noticed Google doing weird things! :P Whether it be a botched up search, or an advertisement for dead people, our favourite search people do have their bad days! :) I caught about three of these, but wasn't satisfied. So I went hunting around the Internet for other people who have chronicled their experience of a Google Goof-up! Here are the more funny one's that I found :) Something to get the weekend off with a laugh!

This was one of the weirder goofs! As you can see in the screenshot, the ads are not so appropriate for a place such as Google groups which are frequented by the elderly (supposedly) and young alike. Google's ads have slipped for other people as well, the funniest one being spotted by Ionut (of Google Operating System). They really need to fix these ones! :P

I believe this is because of spam mails dated in the future to show up 'above' your normal non-spammy mails. But if that is the case, then 'why' is Google indexing spam mails? If that is 'not' the case however, then this comes out as another potential bug! Hehe! How does Google get itself into such spots :P

You can find this post here and confirm it for yourself! Extremely weird! The date clearly says 22 December, and it's last year's, since it shows below other posts of 2006 in the feed. But still the URL shows the year as 2009? I don't know if this is a bug, because I tried republishing the post with the proper date, and still it refuses to change! Blogger URLs are static once they're created, we know that, but they should allow small mistakes like this to be fixed! :P

Haha! I think the picture says it all! :P Mr. Burns = Mr. Blair? I think Google's crawlers managed to unintentionally get this one perfectly right! Great job (and a laugh!) This one is from Ionut's collection some time back.

This was more of a crawler error than a Google goof up, but it is still funny. The thing is that Google definition crawlers look for certain patterns in text which allows it to find different kinds of definitions (for different contexts) from various pages. Unfortunately, a page which had a slightly warped definition for self-promotion got indexed as a legit one, and it showed up in the results! :P

Do you see dead people? Do want great deals on them? Ebay has some! :P Another Google advertisement blooper, also from Ionut's stash.

Do you have some of your own? :)

What's happening with Adsense?

Adsense was launched way back in June 2003 (Press Release) with the promise of allowing sites to make money by serving (relatively) unobtrusive ads on their pages.

Google AdSense, a program that enables website publishers to serve ads precisely targeted to the specific content of their individual web pages. With Google AdSense, publishers serve text-based Google AdWords ads on their site and Google pays them for clicks on these ads -- users benefit from more relevant ads and publishers can maximize the revenue potential of their websites. The self-service option augments the existing content targeting services for publishers announced by Google in March 2003, now making this service available to a broader universe of high-quality websites.

I used to run a small block on my previous blog, which didn't generate much. Hence I am not very keen on running ads on this blog. And for this reason, it makes me wonder where Google is going with their business plan for Adsense, and if it really works like people say it does.

Making sense of Adsense

For the uninitiated, Adsense actually works by displaying adsAds can be in the form of a row of simple text links, or blocks with more info and the latest new format, image ads - like the one's you see on high profile sites. that are targeted to the content on the page they are shown. There are various optimisation methods which you can use to improve the contextual part of it, but they aren't as unobtrusive as you'd like them to be.

You get paid by impression and/or per clickThis system, very cryptically is decided by Google to generate maximum revenue for the 'advertisers', not for you! Google decides what kind of ads (between impression or click paying) it serves. I don't know what algorithms it uses, but I don't think it generates the maximum potential revenue for the publisher :(, and you are paid in your currency whenever your collection reaches a 100 USD. Sounds simple? Well, things get murky from here.

Whenever Google doesn't find matching contentThis is always decided by their crawlers, who will try to figure out the topic of the content, and make the content of your ads target those keywords, it'll serve up public notice ads (you can change this configuration however) for which you do not get paid no matter what. The ad formats themselves are limited, hence you'll have to redesign elements in your sites to make them look a part of it. For example, I couldn't find a place which could hold an ad block in my template, hence one more reason I couldn't put one in. Google should offer more customisability than just allowing you to decide the colours. But more importantly, they should better their business plan to balance the kind of ads that are displayed. If they continue to serve CPC ads on a page where people don't click much, the publisher loses a lot of money and the ads make no sense. They have to give us some reason for wanting to put ads on our beloved blogs, don't they? The only good thing is that a tremendous percentage of the revenue share comes to the publisher, but that share is decreasing annually as wellGoogle Adsense Revenue Distribution.

What does it mean for us?

Viewers don't like to see ads. We have managed to estabilish that fact, and we don't need market research to tell us that. There is an immediate profile of the page we form in our heads whenever we see the familiar looking Adsense ads in any part of the page. Userscripts and Firefox extensions have been developed rigorously to block these ads along with the others. This defeats their purpose to quite an extent, although it doesn't cut out the publisher's revenue share.

At the end of the day, we can conclude that Adsense - barring a few success stories, and high profile bloggers who get tons of viewers everyday - holds nothing for the common blogger except an ambitious and shiney looking possibility. Advertising is always a dicey market to step into, and Google calls itself a contextual advertising company. This pulls in quite a lot of expectations from them by the publishers.

Let's see how Adsense evolves to meet these expectations.

Google's OneBox

I am sure you would have heard of Google's OneBox. It's a way of searching multiple aspects/types of information with just one search keyword and submit. They've been quietly rolling it out to people, who don't even know that it's something new on their part. They would have just been noticing a flurry of new results showing up, and would have have nothing more than Google becoming a little more useful (noisy?). I think it's a brilliant move.

Lessons from SearchMash

SearchMash is Google's playground for technology and new interfaces. It might be more than that, but that's all you get to see anyway. On that page, they have various modules on the sides which give you search results from videos, news, Wikipedia etc.. They've learnt well from seeing results from that page I guess, and have integrated it rather nicely into the mainstream Google search, by removing the clicking through other modules and just showing you the results. If you make people click for more info, they might not click. We have been trained to automatically filter out unwanted results from results automatically. It all adds up pretty well.

I think it would have been better if they would have announced it, and let people know of the various ways they can access results, giving preference to some based on what you're looking for. The latest addition to the OneBox results is information from Wikipedia. All you need to do is append an 'info' to your search term, and Wikipedia results will get bumped to the top. A very good way of searching Wikipedia and Google together :)

Eggs in one basket

As I've spoken about integrating things before, I'll commend Google for doing this because it just saves everyone the trouble of searching for different types of things separately. However, this method has a quickly-obvious pitfall. Google doesn't know which info to give preference, so you might have hunt through to get that perfect match. But this is not that major, so it's alright.

It would be ideal if Google 'learned' from the various searches being performed individually for the different types, and then try to match the relevancy to the search being performed. I don't think they already do this, but they should try and learn from the links people click from searchesThey know which one's you do, since you can go to your Search History and find the links you clicked on for a particular search., and rate them higher for the people. Sort of like a 'click-recommendation' in tandem with a 'link-recommendation'. More clicks, more votes. A simple little addition, but one that could really help.

I just love the way Google thinks. They make thinking up other not-so-probably stuff so much easier :)

Design and Hack testing, and Google server woes

Though the new Blogger has made loading blogs faster, I guess it still has a little more way to go to be handle multiple requests for a page. This is most evident when you're trying to test a new design or a hack, which requires you to constantly preview and reload a page. I don't think is inherently a Blogger problem, because I noticed that requests to Googlepages (my choice file host) were taking long to get completed as well. As I write this, blog feeds have taken a hit. I don't see them on any blogI've checked Phydeaux3, Blogger Hacked, Hackosphere and my blog -- blogs which rely on feeds..

This brings up the question as to what 'is' actually the bandwidth and space that we're offered from Google when hosting at Blogspot. There have been estimates in the past, but I'd sure like a solid number to work with here. Avatar will have them, but he's a little busy on his own these days! :P

Atleast, the server doesn't refuse connections if you overshoot their requests per minute/hour/whatever barrier. It just slows down, which is a more desirable result than a downtime! But then again, it can't take too much server load if you're just having to serve text. As far as I know, all our post content is stored in a database, and is injected into our template by a faster (with bigger capacity?) server and shown to us when the page is requested. It can still get on my nerves when I need to go to bed but the pages won't load fast enough so that I can add that final touch to the CSS or code.

Is Google really ready for a GDrive any time in the near future? I doubt it.

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Google Operating System is facing the same outages. I wonder what really is going on with Blogger... :(

Updates

1-Feb (7:49PM IST) Update: The feeds are still being a little moody, but they're slowly starting to reveal themselves. As Deepak points out in the comments, the Blogger Help Group is flooded with people posting encounters with a 502 server error page. I've managed to avoid it till now, but it sure can't be good.

(11:34PM IST) Update: For a small 5 minutes, I was greeted to this nice little message. I couldn't post, view my dashboard, or do anything else. It seemed like everything with the domain name of 'blogger' or 'blogspot' was down. It seems to have vanished now, with all feeds and Blogger related stuff back online in perfect shape! Strangeness of the highest order! 8|
But it's good everything is back!

A new build?

Advertisements where you wouldn't expect them

The latest buzz doing the round of all the 'well-known' bloggers is how Google has begun pushing it's own services. Unfortunately or not, this is true. If you do a search for anything which has a remote connection with a service Google offers, you'll see an advertisement pop-up right at the top of your search results, offering you a link to that service.

Some look at this as Google going against it's own principle of 'Don't be evil' and that they are beginning to reach the fine line between breaking their own principles in favour of getting more people to use their services and up their ante in the stock market.Arrington sees this as the the beginning of the end to Google's goody-goody impression on people. Blake Ross looks at it as Google going completely against it's principles, and Om Malik is trying to find answers. My question is, 'Is it really that wrong?' Google like every other company deserves to promote their own products and services, even more so because their's are 'comparatively' better than the competitors. Why 'wouldn't' someone want to try out a Google product/service over others? Google is just trying to be more visible to people. With it's influence and reputation, this might be a threat to other companies wanting to foray into the fields Google already has a strong hold in, but it's not like Google is actually 'trying' to kill off the competition. True, Google's 'tips' (as they are called) appear above everything else (including results from your Desktop index file search) but they are only for a few noted products like Blogger, Picasa and Google Calendar. Advertisers ads are in their proper place on the right, and search results follow immediately below the tip.

As pointed out by CNN, Google's ads and tips are virtually invisible as compared to flashing banners and animated pictures used by companies like Microsoft and YahooBoth use 'huge' advertisements all over their pages, including something as simple as their mail services. They don't allow a POP access, which means you 'have' to see those ads if you want to see your mail. Google still allows you to kill out the invisible ads by using a mail client.

This also applies to search, with Google offering a cut down version of their search through their AJAX Search API which shows no ads (as of now). This doesn't seem like the tactics of a company really 'pushing' their advertisements., and they don't offer alternatives either to get a minimal version without the ads. I don't see what there is to complain really.

Advertisements have always been a part of media. Wherever people go, ads will follow. Wherever 'ads' can go, they will. It's as simple as that. Google's ads 'should' take precedence over others, especially because their services are reliable. Except for a few slips (Google Answers for example), no application has failed it's users. If you search for blogs, it's pretty understandable that you 'might' want to start blogging. A tip to help you get started with the best free blogging platform isn't that bad, is it? It 'might' be a little unethical to put their own products before 'everything' else, but that little detail can be ignored, because of the fact that we love Google! Even Facebook is doing it, the only social network to remain free of advertisements till now!

I guess all this is the reason of the tag line Google became famous with. They capitalised on the fact that bigger companies were 'using' their status and power to monopolise their content (even if they were bad) over others. Now that Google is trying to do the same, people are drawing comparisons between what happened then, and what is happening now (even if Google's products deserve a first look). It doesn't make so much a difference to the common person, I'm sure. They'd just ignore the tip, probably because each of those products has been covered and reported as front page news when they were released, so it's quite plausible that even my grandmother would have seen it. If it really bothers you, get Adblock and add the filter.

This is the simple point that I argue. Google offers us the choice, which others don't. Why do we then still tell them, 'Don't be evil'?

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Google has now taken down (maybe temporarily) the tips. I noticed this when yesterday searching for ways of having an offline calendar sync with Google Calendar didn't show the tips to sign up for GCal. I say maybe temporarily because this might be a response to the negative feedback of many bloggers, including influential ones like Arrington (who discovered the take down as well) and Blake Ross. There has been no official announcement, let's wait and watch what Google has in store for us.

I thought they had removed their tips. What is this new thing now?

I've seen one of this, and an advertisement about blogging with Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Atleast, these are still unobtrusive, and not as much in the public eye as the previous 'tips' were.