Main > Archives > 2007 > January > Google Rips-off Microsoft's Live Search

Google might as well have just redirected all their image searches to Live.com's image search since they just about completely ripped Live's image search interface. Barry reports the changes on SearchEngineLand and SERoundtable but fails to mention that this new interface he likes so much is the same as Live.com's. Google Blogscoped has a before and after of Google's interface here but here is a screenshot of Google vs Live. See for yourself.

(3) Thoughts on Google Rips-off Microsoft's Live Search

There are some similarities. But if you were going to clean up the old GIS results pages, what would you change? Seems like a case of "similar because obvious" to me.



There are differences, too. The GIS results pages load faster and respond quicker to user inputs. They don't bother with the (lame) fractional-zooming effect the LIS pages have. The new GIS results page looks and acts the same in IE7, FF2, and Opera9. LIS serves Opera a different page, for some reason.

Comments by Western Infidels : Wednesday, January 24, 2007 at 02:51 PM

This is a very poor change IMHO. 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...

Comments by Nathan Zeldes : Thursday, January 25, 2007 at 02:11 AM

Nathan, I couldn't agree with you more. Not being able to view the domain information without hovering is driving me nuts since I inherently assign a trust score to every domain I see and that's the biggest factor (other than the quality / subject of the image) I use in determining which images to click on. I have not looked at the javascript yet but I'm guessing this is an attempt at collecting data about which pictures are important to users via an onMouseOver event but we'll see if that ends up playing out.

Comments by Jason : Thursday, January 25, 2007 at 06:41 AM

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