Wed, 1 Oct 2008 16:05:56 by Kerry Dye
As Pete pointed out in his blog earlier, the Google interface has remained ostensibly similar since 2001. In fact, there have been quite a number of changes in the pages, most of them pretty subtle.
I remember a major redesign where they eliminated a lot of images and reduced the code size considerably. Clean, tiny code is a bit of a Holy Grail in the Googleplex, and they are infamous for writing JavaScript with the smallest possible character count, including one letter variable names.
And there have been changes to the content of the search results pages, such as Universal Search, which we have now pretty much all got used to.
For many changes, Google runs tests, which sometimes people report on when they see them running. In May 2007, Google actually launched Google Experimental where you can opt in to a particular experiment.
However, there are other tests that are not as well publicised, the latest of which seems to be a trial of the amount of text that is shown as part of the results page, as reported here at TechCrunch. Whether this idea becomes a reality or not will more or less depend on user reaction to the feature, as with most of the tests that Google run.
Add to this the number of changes to the actual algorithms (in 2007 there were more than 450 new improvements, about 9 per week on average), and the fact that there are nearly real-time changes to the actual results (the results of a particular search can sometimes seem to change on a hourly basis) and the Google we see now is never quite the same as the one before – whilst managing to look almost identical.
Kerry Dye
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