Google Universal Search Opt-out, Please!
Posted: January 28th, 2008
For the most part, Google has always been fairly keen on new innovations and staying ahead of the pack. However, their design and layout of universal search (a.k.a. blended search) result pages leaves much to be desired.
Simply put, there is a lack of organization in the universal search results - let alone any logical or intuitive organization. The results look like a head-on collision of text, maps, images, news, videos and any other number of verticals all meshed together.
A quick (unavoidably universal) search of “ice cream” on Google lists Ben & Jerry’s homepage second and a Wikipedia entry third. There are no real surprises here except for what takes spot number one - “News results for ice cream”. Who requires updates about the magical world of ice cream?
In a post back in November, I mentioned that
Ask.com?s adoption of universal search… [is] making headway into re-establishing Ask as a major player…
To add onto that point, it’s also how Ask is returning and displaying its blended search results that’s making it stand out.
There isn’t any way to opt-out of Ask’s universal search at this time either, but at least their interface isn’t making me cringe. In our quest to know “ice cream” better, Ask returns the following:
You’ll notice that the blended results are nicely grouped and aligned to the right. They’ve got images, an excerpt from Wikipedia, recipes, and news. Kudos for including the “recipes” section as it makes sense and actually applies to our query. Even more kudos for shoving ice cream news all the way to the bottom. In fact, it’s so low that it was cutoff from our screenshot.
Note to Google: If you aren’t going to clean up your universal search, at the very least give us the option to opt-out, please!
Yes, I think Google needs to introduce some intelligence into their search results. Ask’s layout is definately the cleaner and nicer of the two.