Google rejigs its interface

By Steve Malone

Posted on 29 Mar 2004 at 12:56

Search engine Google has revamped its user interface to provide a more commercial face to the outside world. The shopping engine Froogle has now been promoted to a main category and the company has given much greater prominence to its contextual advertising alongside search results.

The most obvious change has been the promotion of the Froogle product search service to rank alongside the news, web and images search. Froogle itself is still 'in beta' on the site, and 'organic' product listings - those found by standard spidering - are still free.

One change that may prove controversial is that the 'adwords' have been renamed 'sponsored links' have lost their green background and relevance bar and now appear in much the same livery as standard search page results. Google has followed other sites like alltheweb.com in placing highlighted sponsored links at the top of the page although Google is still running them down the right hand side of the page as well. This has the unfortunate effect of overshadowing the 'News' results which used to be at the top of the page.

Another change which will cause anguish amongst many searchers is the demotion of the Google Directory. As Yahoo will tell you, the popularity of Directory listings has declined over years as search engines have improved and the impossibility of cataloguing all of the world wide web with human editors has become more apparent. However, Directories do provide a way of quickly finding and identifying a site which random web pages often do not.

Elsewhere, there have been a number of other cosmetic changes. Alongside the major categories of Web, Images, etc there is a now a 'more' link which leads to all the other services the Google now offers from 'Answers' to 'Blogger' and 'Directory'.

Tucked away under Google Labs are two new services - 'Personalised Search' and 'Web Alert'. Personalised Search allows you to create a profile by ticking interests. When searching through Google results which match your interests it will be highlighted. The Web Alert is way of creating your own personal versions of the News Alerts. By entering a search term into the search box, Google will provide an email each day providing a list of new web pages each day relating to that interest.

A final change is that a search term is now highlighted in bold if it occurs in the URL. A Google representative has said that this shouldn't be taken as adding to the weight of a site in its ranking. All the latest changes made have been to the user interface and not to the back end ranking algorithms.