A Better Search
Recently google has come to see the light: their favicon sucks. This is true. It does not mean google sucks, but it does say something for the value of design.
There are enough people using google, that when they switched their favicon from bad to worse people made a fuss. Funny enough on their blog they had an article about design variation. It was a point where my heart sunk. It seemed that the ideas of variation and selection were being applied, but it didn’t work. In fact, what wasn’t working was the brief. In addition, their design team had no REAL variation.
Engineering vs Design
The examples were trivial changes to a pre-establish idea of what the end would be. This is very much like engineering, but nothing like design process. In engineering you begin with the end. You have a clear idea of what works, the only problem is how to get there. You want to turn water into hydrogen great, just figure out the stuff inside the box. In design, this thinking is turned on its head. You begin to look broader rather than deeper. Of course there is a deeper phase, but that is reserved for the time when you have the right design in mind. So true variation spans ideas you could never fathom from the beginning of the project. It is meaning and insight which drives true variation, and it is with this tone of righteousness and hubris that I bring you the new google favicons…
A redesign
This opportunity was too good to pass up. We wanted to explore different ways a search could be represented. The constraints: a 16×16 canvas.
- Montage - Show all the favicons, get greasemonkey and install our script
- Cash - A visualization based on the cost of your search terms in adwords
- Count - Showing the results in the context of the search. ten results out of thousands
- History - Google tracks my history, here I can see my past months, represented by a colour
- Location - Pin point yourself, a different colour for each continent
- Modified - Show which pages have last been modified, newer isn’t always better
- Trends - Show a time series pulled from google trends
A bit further
This exercise would not be complete of course without some broader thinking. So when we sought to redesign the favicon we thought we might as well redesign the search. Each google search is essentially a number of properties. These properties, whether they are descriptions, titles, urls, dates, or images, are all driven by the search criteria. In our new search, each facet defined by a user is reflected in the results. Likewise, each result acts as a tool to refine the search results. Key behind this idea is that a search is not an answer, it is a conversation. How to speed up that conversation to arrive at an insight or permanent destination was the challenge.
Technical bottleneck
Unfortunately google’s api did not allow us access to the advanced search data, so we switched to Yahoo. Yahoo’s api allowed us access to terms and through some pipes hackery categories, but alas, not enough. To our disappointment, at the time of this writing, there is no search api which reflects each of its search criteria in the results and vise-versa. This will have to remain a proof of concept until google or yahoo get’s there act together and truly allows people to advance advanced search. One place to look for interesting searches is viewzi. It definitely has the approach of niches rather than one size fits all. But the 3d search is pretty interesting. Also in the realm of search augmentation is piclens. We use this program constantly at the studio, both for its utility, and pure futuristic mega-neato 3dness qualities. Finally to bring it all to a close, our new search might be a throw back to the command line,
Here’s our prototype, its jQuery + Blueprint + Yahoo Pipes, use it if you need it!
