John Battelle's Searchblog

Maybe not new but first I've seen that Google is searching Flash:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22vital+homes%22+leone&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

Thanks John, somehow above URL got corrupted... there's a "%" which should be a "#"...

a few others have noticed this as well

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/001335.html

when I use FireFox from my central PA location and search for Chong it shows 3 pictures in the search results with the third one being a bong.

images have got to be easy to spam

interesting google are trying this out. ask jeeves invented this way of triggering and combining image and web results dynamically and launched it back in april 2003.

maybe they should fix the awful awful google image search before they pr0n up the normal serp's and get gazillions of complaints from irrate parents huh?

:-)

You're so right--the search interface is an absolutely key area for innoviation in search. There is so much room for improvement, even beyond something incremental like adding thumbnails to results.

I think "user interface" will join "personalization" and "coverage" in the list of key trends in search for 2005.

Our own contribution to this is a dedicated search panel, which has gotten excellent feedback and you can check out at http://www.naturallyopen.com/searchpanel. This is an end-user version but a number of engines and content sites are working on customized versions as well.

--
Bob Myers

John, this post is slightly confusing because it seems, as someone commenting above said, that Google is adding thumbnails to search results. They are not.

It's not an evolution of the SERP interface because the changes don't touch the results. All Google is doing is incorporating the first few image results on top of web results. Just as they incorporate results from products, news, books and so on. This is a feature to familiarise users with other search categories and make them easier to access. Because many ordinary users never go beyond web results. Putting these category results on top of web Google is addressing these users. It's like they're saying, "Hey, you can also do this..."

Not many may remember but three years ago Google Labs featured a product that showed you thumbnails with each result. Thumbnails of result page are almost never very helpful. And they cost download time, which is very expensive on the results page. The product was later shelved.

I've personally used at least two other products that tried thumbnails but never became popular. One showed you a thumbnail preview of a page as you hovered over a link. Another added thumbnails to Google results page itself. A quick visit to google reveals there are many more.

@Manu: Ask did some research which indicates people actually find thumbs very useful. See: http://www.veritest.com/clients/reports/askjeeves/askjeeves_usability.pdf

Very useful? Have you read the 84-page report? One of the results was, "In the likelihood to make Ask Jeeves their primary search engine, the bulk of both groups’ responses fell into the range of ‘5 Somewhat Likely to 2 Not Likely’." How's that for irrefutable evidence of effectiveness of the thumbnail technology.

Even if one ignores for a moment that the report was commissioned by Ask, not an independent organisation, glancing at the results and the tasks is all that is needed to understand why and how the study provided a skewed picture [pun intended].

In the results, there's no evidence that the second group was greatly successful. At best, participants had less than moderate success with the binocular version over the control group.

But more importantly - all five tasks were such that participants would have inadvertently found thumbnails useful. Four of them required looking at visuals -- find Renaissance pictures, find a good clipart site, what does India's flag look like, find a page with an image of sun on top. The fifth task was to judge a page for quality -- something that a recent report said users gauged from the design of a website.

Do these look like the tasks you and I perform everyday? Looking at my history, the last few searches I performed were to find - the market share of existing search engines, whether intelligentsia is spelled correctly, a map of Delhi on mapquest, whether a particular non-profit has a website, and if anyone in the blogosphere commented on Apple computers seen all around Googleplex in the 60 minutes video.

I don't see how thumbnails would help in any of these searches. Each of those was a very specific search to find a particular piece of mostly non-visual information.

just a quick FYI - those not wanting to wait for Google to add thumbnails can use the McSP plugin for Firefox that drops Alexa thumbnails into Google searches, among other sites. i'm a big fan.

To add to what I said above, there is at least one scenario in which thumbnails can be really useful - when searching for a site you've visited before.

Hmm, isn't this http://moregoogle.com which is now http://lostgoggles.com (apparently Google didn't like their name in the original site)

Where will all this end with Google?

http://www.grapevine-group.co.uk

Google is God... for now... :)