Google To Launch Customizable Search Tonight

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A couple of months ago, Google vice president Marissa Mayer wrote about Google’s views on the future of web search. One of the things she talked about was the ability to personalize the search experience. “Search engines of the future will be better in part because they will understand more about you, the individual user,” she wrote.

One way they could do that, is by allowing users to rate, reorder, and comment on search results, teaching the search engine over time what types of sites you like. Google tonight will be opening up to the public an experimental feature they’ve been testing for a few months called SearchWiki, reports CNET.

SearchWiki lets users reorder and remove results, and leave comments on specific links. Google will remember changes that people make to search results pages, and subsequent searches will display results with the user’s customizations and notes. Users will also have the option of seeing how other searchers have rated and reordered search results and view other people’s notes, making search results a collaborative effort.

In some ways, the process is reminiscent of Wikia Search, the collaborative search engine launched by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, which allows searchers to edit, annotate, and comment on search results. We also reported on a project in October from Microsoft Research Japan called “U Rank,” that allowed users to rank and reorder search results in a collaborative environment.

According to CNET, Google seemed open using human input gathered via SearchWiki to improve their general search algorithm, though stopped short of saying that was something they were planning to do. “We don’t close any doors,” said Cedric Dupont, product manager for Google’s SearchWiki, who said they look at all sorts of signals regarding how to better tweak their search algorithm. “Search is adapting to the Internet as it becomes a more participatory medium. Now you have people telling us specific things about how they’d like to see their search results.”

Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" Button Costs Them $110 Million/Year

Because the button takes users directly to the top search result, Google doesn't get to show search ads on one percent of all its searches. That costs the company around $110 million in annual revenue, according to Rapt's Tom Chavez. So why does Google keep such a costly button around?

Google's Number One UI Mistake

Google's user interface minimalism is admirable. But there's one part of their homepage UI, downloaded millions of times per day, that leaves me scratching my head:


Google: I'm not feeling so lucky.

Does anyone actually use the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button? I've been an avid Google user since 2000; I use it somewhere between dozens and hundreds of times per day. But I can count on one hand the number of times I've clicked on the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.

I understand this was a clever little joke in the early days of Google-- hey, look at us, we're a search engine that actually works! -- but is it really necessary to carry this clever little joke forward ten years and display it on the monitors of millions of web users every day? We get it already. Google is awesomely effective. That's why I use it so much. That's why Google is the start page for the internet, loading the Google homepage is virtually synonymous with internet access, and the verb "to Google" is at risk of becoming a genericized trademark. Google has won so decisively, so utterly, and so completely that the power they now wield over the internet actually scares me a little. Okay, it scares me a lot.

So can we get rid of the superfluous button now?

You might say it's only one more button, so where's the harm. I say giving a feature that's used less than one percent of the time parity with the "Search" button is a needless distraction for users. Furthermore, the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button is only available on the homepage-- it's not a part of any browser toolbar searches, and Google's intermediate search page results don't offer it, either. Why not standardize and stick with the simple, single "Search" button that everyone understands and expects, on every page? Why muddy the waters with a button that's so rarely useful, and on the homepage of all places? The thought necessary to mentally omit this needless button from the page may be miniscule-- but multiply that by the millions upon millions of users who are affected, and all of a sudden it starts to add up to real time. Don't make us think!

If you're an advanced computer user, you may be wondering why we bother with Search buttons at all when we have a perfectly good ENTER key on our keyboards. As shocking as this may be to us homo logicus, not everyone understands how that works. Sure, we think it's crazy to take our hand off the keyboard, where we were just typing our search query, move it all the way over to the mouse, then carefully move the mouse pointer to a button and left-click it... when we could just take that very same hand, already poised over the keyboard, and lazily tap the ENTER key.

But typical users don't really understand basic keyboard shortcuts. They love their mice, and their big, fat, honking "Search" buttons. That's why the current versions of Firefox and IE both have an integrated "go" button directly next to the address bar-- so users have something obvious to click once they've typed the URL into the address bar. Otherwise, I guess, they'd sit there wondering if their computer had frozen.

Internet Explorer 7 address bar

Personally, I always use the keyboard ENTER key to complete my searches, but I'd be open to a keyboard shortcut such as SHIFT+ENTER that invoked the Lucky function. I still can't imagine using it more than once a week at most-- and that's probably an optimistic estimate.

Strunk and White urged us to Omit Needless Words:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

I urge us to Omit Needless Buttons. I hope the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button isn't considered a sacred cow at Google. Removing it would be one small step for Google, but a giant collective improvement in the default search user interface for users around the world.