Slaughtering the holy cow - greatness is not forever

A couple of weeks ago, on World Usability Day, I met up with a couple of people in a Manchester pub to talk usability. Our consensus had been that going to the pub was definitely the right thing to do (is this the reason Silicon Valley didn't happen in northern England?) but to keep on message we each had to bring an example of bad design that we thought could be improved.

The first thing that popped into my head was Google. Something I use every day, and that generally makes me very happy, but that I've becoming more frustrated with in recent months. The primary reason for this is that Google lets you search the web, or it lets you search news, or it lets you search images. It even lets you search blogs and video.

My problem is that sometimes I want to search the web and images. Sometimes I'd like to search news and blogs, or perhaps news and video. I can't even find Google's own blog and video search engines without Googling them!

Also, I quite often want to do what Google consider advanced searches. Now, if I was a good geek I'd remember all the syntax to do this in the front page search box, but I'm not. I've only just nailed that it's "-" to exclude a word, not "NOT". And I'm fairly sure I don't use some of the advanced options that I might, because I need to remember they're there - the options aren't available for recall.

So, my solution is to keep the Google page nice and simple - indeed to enhance the simplicity of the page up at the business-end: the text box. But then to add options to search across different types of content directly on that front page.

I'd also like to bring some of the advanced options up to the front page - if I worked at Google, I'd find out what the most popular types of advanced searches were (perhaps they vary by location?) and put these on the front page. As I don't, I've just selected a few at random for the effect.

So, what do you reckon? Do you think this is an improvement?

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