The Google UI that has been with us since the beginning is not fast enough.
Well, I should clarify. The current Google workflow is just fine for searches for which there is one clear, perfect hit to pursue. One search, a bit of scanning, and one click to get to the results.
What Google is missing is that finding an answer often involves hunting through several sources. Google could be made significantly more efficient by considering this larger workflow.
Here is the typical best-practices workflow for checking out multiple hits from Google:
- Type in a search
- Skim the results for hits that may be credible.
- Control-click the links that may have the answer you are looking for into new tabs. This could be many tabs.
- Peruse the tabs one by one.
- Search within the page for the results you are looking (it could take some digging).
- Once you find the answer you are looking for, go back and close the rest of the tabs.
It’s up to the end-user, using facilities in the browser to efficiently examine multiple search engine hits.
Here is the design to steal: Search engine results don’t require very much width. So why not show the search results in one column and a preview of the destination page in another? Clicking a link would still go directly to the destination page. But there are additional clear buttons to view the destination page (or its faster, cached version) in another pane. The new workflow might look something look like this rough mockup:
Step 1. Type in a search and get search results
Step 2. Click the Cache button next to pertinent search result to instantly see the cached version.
The cached version appears much more quickly than loading the page from the destination site.
The user could also click “Show page” to fetch the latest, live version.
Step 3. If that isn’t the result you needed, click on other cached results
Here is the result after clicking “Show cached” button for a different search hit:
The page is pre-scrolled to the area that most closely matches the search and the relevant section highlighted. This saves the user from having to work as hard to find the useful information within the results page.
Step 4. If you want to read the destination page, click into it.
If the user has found a useful page there is a clear way of going to it. The search results would disappear and the entire browser window would show the destination page.
A further optimization
If Google had clear a sense of what the top hit would be for a given search, it would take the liberty of loading it by default, without the user having to click any links. This effectively integrates the “I’m Feeling Lucky” functionality with the regular search results.
What is going on?
This solution is made possible by the larger screens we now have. They are wide enough that we can see both the search results and a useful part of the destination page at once.
In this design approach the search results behave like a vertical set of tabs. You don’t have to manage your own browser tabs, which confers several benefits: (1) You don’t have to work as hard to find the results within the destination pages. Since Google is controlling the presentation of the results it can highlight the relevant parts nicely. (2) You don’t have to worry about the memory drain of having many browser tabs open at once. (3) You don’t have to clean up the tabs after you have found what you were looking for. (4) And one click on each search result is enough to peruse its content, as opposed to one Ctrl-click to open the results in a tab, another click to go to that tab and another click to close the tab when you are done. One click instead of 3 for each search result you visit. If you have to check out four hits to find your answer, that’s four clicks instead of twelve.
For best results, the cache would be fast. It must be, because it is competing with the efficient alternative of ctrl-clicking tabs and having the browser load the pages in parallel in the background.
Content owners may not be all that thrilled with a search engine employing this approach. It encourages access to the cache rather than hitting the target site directly for the guaranteed freshest content displayed as the site owner intended. Google might do is set up an API whereby site owners could find out how often their site is being served up from Google’s cache. [Readers, do they do this already?]
[As usual, if you know someone who might be able to do something with this idea, please forward them this article.]
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Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones. To follow him on Twitter click here.
I am aware of an industrial directory that has been doing this for years. he sells them as ads, but any small advertiser there would/should view it as a quick preview to thier website/services.
here is another search engine that is doing something like this already;
http://www.viewzi.com/search/power_grid/website%20design%20services%20nh
I cannot see google doing this as it depletes serious cash flow real estate (sponsored links). in the days of old, they may have, but now that shareholders own them, I dont see google dumping that real estate. i could be wrong??
All this to say…it IS an awesome idea & if viewzi.com could get some good PR, it might take off.
Thanks for sharing your ideas. they keep me up at night brainstorming, so keep ‘em coming!!
cb in NH
Thanks so much for the props, Chris B!
And thanks to the viewzi reference. It’s not quite the same thing since you still have to open the page to see if the result you want is there.
The interesting thing to me is that it shows that the problem of optimally performing search is not completely solved; that there is still room for more innovation. I am sure something will leapfrog the design that I proposed.
Although I didn’t include it in my mockup, Google should be able to do this while preserving ad real estate. It is possible that they’d get more click-throughs, because the cost to the user of peeking at what’s there is lower.
The nature of innovation says that if there is a significantly better way of helping people find what they need, someone will do it sooner or later. At that point Google will have no choice but to respond with something at least as strong.
By the way, any developer could actually create a prototype of the above design using Google’s api’s. I’d love to see this in action!
Best regards,
Philip
Twitter: @dphaine
Look into the “Wolfram Alpha Google” and “Googlepedia” firefox extensions, they do something similar to this.