You can see the beginnings of Google's ruin already, which was inevitable. Nobody can ever leave things alone even though they are working just fine. Someone always has to try to fix things when they're not broken. Once the process begins, it never ends, and it's begun at Google.

The company has made minor tweaks now and then, no big deal. But the recent and more aggressive changes have been terrible. The biggest so far is the change in the way the company handles image search. I think it was drawn into the current stupidity because and other search sites make the images page fancy with a little Ajax or JavaScript to jazz them up, as if users care. What users actually care about is speed, and none of these enhanced pages do much for that, especially the

In the past, when you searched for an image on Google, you got a single page of thumbnails that pretty much loaded instantly like any other page. When you saw the image you wanted, you clicked on it and got it as a stand-alone image and the option to view the page where the image existed. This was fast, simple, and effective. More importantly the image thumbnail on the original page had link information that you could look at. In other words, the location of where the image could be found. This was handy for creative searching. It also gave you actual image size information. No more.

Now when you do an image search, Google loads up one massive page with apparently every image it could find, most of which are not remotely what you were interested in. Instead of the single page of thumbnails, you get over 20 pages of large thumbnails all on the same huge page. And that's all you get. There is no information, just endless thumbnails. No sizes, no locations to scan, nothing! And it takes forever to load all these large thumbnails. If you make a mistake in your query, you'll have to wait and wait until the process is over. And because thousands of useless large thumbnails are loaded, a huge waste of user bandwidth takes place each time.

Now you have to place the pointer on top of each image for an Ajax-like pop-out to happen, which gives you the size and location information. So instead of being able to scan the entire page with a simple glance to find an image from say, usgs.gov, you have to put the cursor on each and every image and wait for a pop out with the information.

And if you click on the image to go to the site where the image is found, it delivers a weird Ajax-like result with the image superimposed over the containing website. It's not only weird, but has crashed the browser more than a few times. Did I say weird? I meant, it sucks!

How is this an improvement? It's adding a stupid feature, trying to show off. The entire image search is now pretty much useless. It takes at least twice as long to use, and is needlessly fancy. It does not make the experience easier, it makes it harder. It wastes time and bandwidth. Welcome to the new Google.

And I see nothing on the search settings page that allows for any changes. If I have my results settings set to ten results per page, why do I get thousands of pics? That doesn't seem like ten to me. This improvement is an abominationthe beginning of the end.

And if you think I'm wrong about this being a new trend at Google, then all you have to do is read the news from yesterday. Google has decided to add a This is another useless feature that someone thinks improves the experience when it does nothing but show off the fact that someone can code JavaScript or some other display manipulation language.

The idea here is that you run your pointer over the search results and a mini page pops up, showing you what the page looks like. A preview, if you will. I first saw this as an add-on and special feature a decade ago. It didn't catch on then, so why would it now?

It was cute, but basically stupid. The idea, I suppose, was to remind you what the page looks like if you are trying to re-find something you lost track of. Use your history menu for that! This is another bandwidth hog of an idea that, to be honest, turns out to be an annoying nuisance.

Does Google think it needs to add these dreadful features because Bing is breathing down its neck? It must, since the changes to the image page are right out of Bing. Curiously, the old MSN Live Search did it better than Bing. Meanwhile Yahoo, which licenses the Bing engine, has maintained more practical image results and is now superior to both Google and Bing. Go figure!

It doesn't take a genius to see that Google is beginning to make huge judgment errors. And I can assure you, this image fiasco isn't a mere or minor diversion. It's a sign of bad things to come. An omen.