#008000
Posted at February 27, 2006 11:53 AM - Category: The Web
That's the color of search. Ask.com unveiled their new site today, sans the Jeeves mascot. Jeeves or no Jeeves, it does look good. But at the same time, rather familiar. Take a look at some search results and you'll notice some similarities. Just to be crystal clear, I took some screen shots of a few of the bigger search engines out there:
Wow, they almost all look exactly the same! You can't really blame them, since they all want to be as big as Google. But being Google isn't going to make you as big as them. In fact, it would be much more effective to be different from Google, I think. Of course, I'm sure they have plenty of usability testing to back up the fact that people like their bold title, description text, green URL format. It even goes further than visual presentation to the actual functionality of the application itself. You'll notice in all the URLs for searches, sans Yahoo!, they use q as the search variable in the input. Yahoo! uses a p, but it's still a single letter. Of all people, you'd figure MSN would have something a little more complex...
In any case, I'm kind of sick of the search engines all trying to copy Google blatently. I've seen some neat apps built on top of Yahoo!'s search APIs which I wish the big guys would pick up on. God knows they're good enough at copying as it is.
