i have the old way back

Both my like.

yeah i can see it too.. :/

Not only did Google change the layout back, but it seems that Google also updated their search results.

I'm an earth science teacher. I was searching for images of specific geologic features yesterday, but today I'm getting different (yet better) results.

I don't have any screenshots to prove this, but is anyone else getting any different results for specific searches?

One other minor tidbit (I think it was doing this before?) is that if you have mutltiple results on the page, it will provide a hotlink to show all from that site.

I.e. The first two results for this Google image query:
   http://images.google.com/images?&q=weed
are from my site. I certainly wasn't "trying" for that keyword, but it is kinda priceless to have your Father-in-Law rank #1 for "weed" – for those that don't know, that is American (International?) Slang for marijuana! ;-)

Note that on the second result, there is a hotlink that adds the "site:" parameter – I see similar behavior for this search also – http://images.google.com/images?&q=hulk

I have the old one on mine...

I'm glad they have reversed it, I didn't like the new design at all.

> I don't have any screenshots to prove this, but is
> anyone else getting any different results for specific
> searches?

I think Google Image search is terribly slow. I released Cover Browser on October 9, 2006, and as of yet there's not a single image result for [site:coverbrowser.com]. The same query returns lots of web page results almost from the beginning.

I think

live.com

owns image search anyway! I always use live.com for image search, much nicer experience.

Usability-wise, I think the one with the information visible is better. This way, users would no longer have to continually move their mouses (mice?) when they want to see more details.

Aesthetics-wise, though, there might be some merit to having the thumbnails display only the URL and then hide other information unless a user mouses over. This proves to be a less cluttered design.

However, I would think Google cares more about usability rather than aesthetics (think of the plain google.com home page). Therefore the display with more info won.

They could just put a toggle at the top of the page or in the Preferences: Show advanced info / basic info about search results.

Joel Spolsky says:

<<*Every time you provide an option, you're asking the user to make a decision.* That means they will have to think about something and decide about it. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but, in general, you should always try to minimize the number of decisions that people have to make.>>

The whole article is a great read:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000059.html

I know, I read it, but this would be the equivalent of the "Full Screen" option from any browser/media player. Show me the page/video and only that.

Come to think of, where does Google currently provide permanent options (those that are sticky and "memorized" by your Google Account, and apply to their web apps)?

- SafeSearch on/ off...
- The Google homepage you want to see (e.g. google.com vs google.de)
- Google personalized homepage, sort of
- Number of results (10 – 100... though is this really a setting one would want to have permanently?)
- ...?

(... and what about true "interface/ layout" options?)

In the cookie. I set Firefox to delete all the cookies everytime I close the browser, so I have to choose Google.com in english when I open the browser.

Maybe it's hard to change the old system, from the time when Google didn't have accounts...

I am seeing it the old way too.

> In the cookie.

Sorry, a misunderstanding: I didn't mean to ask how Google technically implements the permanent storing, but rather, I was pondering in which ways/ where Google engineers currently decided to utilize permanent user settings. It was more of a usability question – where do Google engineers decide an option is better than a static default?

I noticed that Google doesn't provide choices/options for almost anything. For example, the no. of columns in Google IG, the color themes in Gmail or if you want OneBoxes, related searches and "Note this" in the SERPs.

The one place where I distinctively remember wanting to tweak the setting is the personalized homepage. Apparently, the tabs vs no-tabs discussion is so completely split among users that no one will ever be able to come to a conclusion with this, so we will always have to have this as option (I'm a no-tabs person :)).

It's funny to do this:

* have tabs in Firefox – one of the tabs is Google IG
* in Google IG you have tabs
* in one of the tabs, you have the "Feeds in tabs" gadget (http://www.google.com/ig/directory?root=%2Fig&dpos=top&num=24&url=http://www.google.com/ig/modules/feeds_tabs.xml&q=feeds+tabs&start=0)

and everything runs in a tab of IE7 as an XP virtual machine in Microsoft Virtual Server (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Virtual_Server).

Screenshot? :)

Ionut: I second Philipp. That definitely sounds screenshot worthy! :)

I voted for the old/reinstated design. Who cares about aesthetics if you can't even use it properly? For example, the more polished design even left out the links to more pictures from the same site, forcing you to hover over each result to find out which ones contained the links to more pictures! However, based on the significant minority of users who preferred the redesign to some degree, I'd advocate putting an option into Image Search Preferences. Users who go there are looking to make decisions, anyways, so it shouldn't violate Joel Spolsky's Sacred Less-Options Tenet. ;)

Their results still suck.

They list our image, but when you click on it, it takes you to another site entirely that doesn't have the image on it.

Case in point:
Search for UFO and you will see an image (Probably on the first row. I See it as #2 from left) from ufo.whipnet.org

Click the image and it takes you elsewhere. Nice. That site gets all the credit while we foot the bandwidth.

I am making all of our images "no-index"

John

I'm glad they changed it back. Now we can call it Google Images Classic.