Google Black Bar- Opinions?

[phongn]

Google's also finally allowed some of their UI/UX designers to actually do what they're paid for and there's a pretty major revamp of their products ongoing. Google Maps (at least in the US) already has the new look, and I suspect other pages will follow suit. Who knows, maybe YouTube will also become Google-ized.

[Shroom Man 777]

I preferred the simplistic blue outlines they had before, to be honest.

[Molyneux]

I quite liked having Google's front page as a simple white thing with an elegant logo and a search bar, and not much else.
Striking simplicity is the way to go.

[Terralthra]

I'm trying to figure out if that was sarcasm, and I'm just not getting the "joke."

[Terralthra]

I opened up a brand new browser with absolutely no history or cookies to it at all, and it...worked just fine? I don't understand the complaint. The page loaded just fine, Google Instant was responsive for me, though it didn't return effective results (as your user name is apparently also a band that spells its name just a little different), but as soon as I added "XIII" it cleared all that and found your blog and your member profile here. This is on an Atom-powered Netbook running Ubuntu 11.04, Epiphany web browser.

No significant load time, no pain, no fuss. I seriously don't understand your complaints at all. Slow your computer to a crawl? Loading tons and tons of shit? It's a bar with links to gmail, calendar, maps, etc....just like Bing.com has at the top.

Worth noting that a Bing search for your username returned less useful links at the top of the search results than Google did.

[Terralthra]

Measuring page load times, Bing is slightly slower on initial load (average over 100 clean loads) - Bing: 0.35 seconds; Google: 0.31 seconds. Again, that's with Epiphany web browser, which should be agnostic to search provider preference.

As for current location, I'm in SF, CA, so there is doubtless a Google data center near me, but there are also Microsoft ones nearby as well.

As for Google Instant, which I gather is a large part of your complaint, I can only say that when I'm searching for popular items easily identifiable from the first few letters, it's very useful, but when I'm searching for obscure things having similar names to less obscure things, it's not at all useful.

The black bar doesn't show up on the Google home page for me when logged in, but it does show up on Maps, Calendar, etc. That they left some of the headers a medium gray is a bit annoying. It's readable, but it might not be in brighter ambient light. The black bar shows up on the home page when operating clean.

[mcoxx]

I personally don't like how everything is left justified more than I don't like the black bar. about 2/3 of my screen is nothing but white space. I did however find a way to fix it if anyone is interested. I'm glad I did because I was not about to become a Yahoo! user.


https://bbs.stardestroyer.net/ucp.php?m ... &k=FQNWOEQ

[Terralthra]

I don't think that's the link you intended to use.

[Executor32]

D13, I live in a small town west of DeKalb, Illinois. I tried your test, including clearing cookies. Google loaded in 263ms, and loading search results for 'beans' took 259ms. Bing took 177ms and 566ms, respectively. This is with Firefox 5 running on this system, connected to Comcast's 16Mbps service using the onboard gigabit LAN. Pinging both sites took 14ms for Google and 16ms for Bing.

As far as human perception is concerned, initial load time is almost identical and Bing is a bit slower to load search results; therefore, I have to say that I, too, don't understand your complaint. In fact, the only way I can imagine Google taking noticeably longer and loading all kinds of extra shit for you is if you're using iGoogle, and that's to be expected if that's the case.

[Executor32]

In my case, the Extended Statusbar extension.

[Simon_Jester]

I will say in defense of Google: they let you turn off instant-search.

That is, I think, the single most important insight any company which offers a complex service can have. The user may or may not want the new wrinkle you've added to the product. He may love it- great. Or he may never use it, in which case it's nothing but a waste of bandwidth and potentially an irritant. Not everyone who uses Google searches has a Gmail account, or is interested in Google+, or wants an applet that tells them whether it's raining outside, or cares about the sixteen different kinds of advanced searches you can do with Google. Even if they want and use those things, they don't want or use them all the time.

So the ability to turn all these features off, individually, and decide whether or not to partake of them is really important.

I would find instant search nearly intolerable if it weren't easy to turn off, because it almost always guesses wrong. I like having it guess search terms in the search line, mind you, but I don't like having it do a fresh Google search for "target" when I type the letter 't,' "thesaurus" when I type the 'h' and 'e,' "themes" when I type the 'm,' and several more such searches before I finish typing in in "them bones."

(totally random example)

But because I can turn it off, I don't have to worry about that, and Google just waits for me to tell it what I want, then goes and finds it. Which is great, exactly what I've been using the thing for for years. That makes instant search a vastly better feature than it would be otherwise- even if it's very good at what it does, you need to be able to make it not do that thing.

This is something I think Google has trouble grasping at times. It's not that hard to create well-designed features; talent is cheap. But it's nearly impossible to design features that everyone wants to use all the time... which is pretty much what they try to do sometimes, and fail.

EDIT: This reminds me of something I've heard about in military command and control systems: information overload. A well designed system for helping anyone to do anything should tell them what they need to know, yes- but it should only place a minority of that information right in front of their face, the stuff they need to be aware of all the time. Trying to put absolutely everything in front of their nose just leads to confusion and distraction.

[Simon_Jester]

D-XIII, your experience of Google's slowness simply doesn't match mine, or that of other people I'm seeing here.

Are you sure it isn't some bizarre technical thing related to your area and not actually Google's fault? Because "my downloads are slow so they suck" is only a good argument if everyone's downloads are slow.

[D.Turtle]

I (and many others) have used Google for years without performance problems. Blaming "short memories" when your experience goes counter to that of all other people is a bit disingenuous.

The page redesign was coloring the bar at the top black. Not something that would significantly alter performance.

Just fucking give up and admit your argument is stupid.

[HeadCreeps]

On my packet-loss heavy ISP, I've frequently had google instant not load anything. After fully typing out my search attempt, I can press enter and I will get absolutely no result. In order to make google work, I have to hit F5 and reload the page. This seems more likely because of my poor ISP than because of google itself, but I'm not sure. Instant experiences an error with this, regardless.

Another problem with the instant results is when the first letter of my search is "f". I've had it take me straight to "facebook" and fully autocomplete my search when in fact I don't even use the godforsaken site.

Overall, I'm happy with google and I think the instant search is beneficial, but it does have problems in my experience.

I'm not sure, but they seem to have changed the overall color scheme of more than just the black bar now. The sidebar on the left side of the search results now matches much more correctly with the black bar, but the contrast with google's blue is a bit too much. The blue probably needs more black in it, now.

[Simon_Jester]

D-XIII, you're being foolish.

What makes you think that everyone who disagrees with you must be a mindless fan of Google?

You say that Google searches are very slow. Other people say that their Google searches are not very slow. Does this mean that all the other people are "sucking Google's cock," or that maybe you just have slow Google searches for some reason that doesn't make any difference to anyone else?

You say that Google's products are mostly unusable shit. Other people use them without noticing anything that makes the products unusually shitty. This does not mean they are "sucking Google's cock," it just means they don't perceive this massive difference you do. "I don't give a damn" is not the same as "I am fellating."

Now, if there was a 50/50 split of opinions in the thread here, I could buy that it was Google fans versus sane people. But instead, there is one person who thinks Google is shit, and a bunch of people who think it's basically OK, more or less, even if they don't like some changes made to the main page lately or have some other minor complaint.

So maybe the problem is that you have this intense hate going for Google, and are therefore unwilling to believe that anyone else's experience with them might be- not even positive, but just neutral. Unwilling to believe that they might not see Google searches being ridiculously slow, since to them "done in half a second" and "done in 0.4 seconds" amount to about the same thing.

And therefore, they all must be deranged Google-fans, because there can be no other explanation in your mind for why other people might not perceive the same problem with them that you do.

It's foolish.

[Executor32]

No shit there's been a lot of changes, since you avoid Google like the plague. The only ones that were concurrent with the black bar, though, were the changes to the sidebar color scheme and icons. Everything else you named has been there for months, and 'new location thing' has been there since February of last year, though its design and location in the sidebar have changed a couple times since then.

[Executor32]

Everything else you named has been there for months

gotten on a random web search (via google omfg!11!1!)
http://blogoscoped.com/files/google-hom ... n-2011.png

grabbed just a minute ago:
http://arsdnet.net/wrong.png

Fine, the main page buttons, logo, and link movement were concurrent, too. Are you happy? It still doesn't change the fact that not all of the items you listed were part of this latest redesign, i.e the topic of the goddamn thread.

HOLY SHIT IT'S LIKE I'VE BEEN SAYING THEY REDESIGNED THE SITE A COUPLE DAYS AGO


Jesus fuck, I'm tired of dealing with stupid people at every god damned turn.

You can get right the fuck down off your high horse. You called it a 'new location thing', and it's not fucking new by any stretch of the imagination.

[open_sketchbook]

Y'all realize they are doing this to save power, right? A black pixel takes something like 15% less energy than a white pixel on CRT and plasma monitors. Considering the millions upon millions of people who use google multiple times every day, that's not an insignificant figure.

[Agent Sorchus]

If they wanted to be more economical in there design the would just switch to the blackle theme. Which is what I use most often anyway.

[Executor32]

Fine, the main page buttons, logo, and link movement were concurrent, too. Are you happy? It still doesn't change the fact that not all of the items you listed were part of this latest redesign, i.e the topic of the goddamn thread.

Which ones?

The gear icon for settings, so you were mostly right, I was mostly wrong. Go ahead and gloat some more, you know you want to.

You can get right the fuck down off your high horse. You called it a 'new location thing', and it's not fucking new by any stretch of the imagination.

Prove it.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/e ... eature.png

no location on sidebar. june 30, 2011

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/ ... -look.html

no location on sidebar, may 5 2010

Oh, would you look at that.

[Simon_Jester]

What makes you think that everyone who disagrees with you must be a mindless fan of Google?

I'm saying everyone who is acting like a mindless fan of Google is a mindless fan of Google.
Fan is proven by their defending it without evidence.
Mindless is proven by making several factual errors and logical fallacies.

Multiple people have provided you with evidence on search speeds, which you did not deign to notice. Multiple people have also made arguments that either don't contain logical fallacies, or contain the same damn one you've been throwing around yourself (I dislike Google, therefore it is shit).

However, your trolling has become so transparent and self-parodic that I should probably leave it at that.

[Executor32]

Ever since you said Google is unusable shit, not that it was unusable shit, apparently. When you speak in the present tense, people tend to assume you're talking about the present. Who knew?

Another thing, your evidence is anecdotal as well, by your apparent standards. I guess we should all just say Bing sucks, call you a fucking idiot, and tell you to deal with it, then?

[Simon_Jester]

Since when are anecdotes (based on the present) acceptable evidence (about the past)?

Christ.

Other people actually sat down and measured how long it took searches to happen.

You didn't.

[aerius]

Y'all realize they are doing this to save power, right? A black pixel takes something like 15% less energy than a white pixel on CRT and plasma monitors. Considering the millions upon millions of people who use google multiple times every day, that's not an insignificant figure.

Problem is it saves energy on CRT and plasma monitors but it actually uses more energy with LCD screens. Now I don't know how things are in the rest of the world, but where I am it's pretty much LCDs everywhere.

As for the black bar, I think it's retarded, it does not match with the rest of the page and it looks horrible. It was all downhill after the light blue text scheme, the blue bar was worse, this is even worse.

[D.Turtle]

Interestingly enough my experience is exactly the opposite. As soon as I see the Google page I can start typing (maybe a second after typing in the url in the address bar). While Bing takes longer to load and then still takes another second or so until I can start typing.

But hey since your anecdote beats my anecdote (and the anecdotes of several other people) you are demonstrably proven correct that Google is unusably slow and broken which is why it is constantly losing more and more traffic to the vastly superior bing.com.



Or not.