How Google Got its New Look (opens in new tab)

I'm almost tempted to use Bing. The new look reminds me of AltaVista or Excite back in the day, and recent Google search results have been about the same quality. When did they lose their touch?

It does look a lot like Bing - but they copied the intelligent suggestions part of Bing, which is what I like about it (for example, the images filter will stand out when Google thinks I might be looking for images). I kind of wish they would give me suggested queries on the left like Bing does too.

Ever since I had my Google service disrupted by the Great Chinese Firewall (text queries are fine now, but innocent Google image queries have always been dicey whereas Bing image searches are almost never blocked), I've been using Bing as my default. I'm pretty satisfied with the results for the text result queries. And when you compare the two image search engines (at least interface-wise), I think Bing wins hands down.

The search options (or, as of yesterday, “tools”) have become tremendously helpful, making them more visible seems like a obvious step to take. Might be annoying for people like you and me who always knew how to access and use them but I think we are in the minority.

(All else is mostly cosmetic and very much a question of taste. I see signs of clear progress with a aesthetic that, while being distinctively Google, manages to convey to me for the first time that they care about details.)

Because lines which allow for more than, say, one hundred characters are a bad idea?

If you try different display options you will see that the width of the pages is designed around such a line length limit. They don’t shy away from going wider when they don’t show text (try Images) or from using a additional column (try Updates). This suggests to me that they know of the space they have, they just don’t want to fill it by mindlessly lengthening lines.

Yeah, but have you seen the percentage of users with > 1280 pixels? Certainly not the majority.

I've heard that on multiple occasions from Googlers.

Do people impulse-buy stocks? (I wouldn't wonder.. maybe they think reading a magazine article counts as "research"?)

It applies to me, and I'm in Canada.