Andy Chase

You know you're on to something when changing your home page interface sends the entire Internet into paroxysms of interface nitpicking.

"But I liked the tabs!"

"This new, leaner design just shows once again that Google is head and shoulders above the rest of the search engine crowd. In fact, I'm going to name my firstborn child Google."

For my part, I didn't really notice the change until it was pointed out by every weblog RSS feed in my aggregator... and even then I didn't find it all that earth-shattering. I mean, you go to Google.com, type in your query, and hit enter. If you need to search Groups or Images, you click those links first. It still works the same as it has for as long as I can remember, and they've added Froogle.

The links are in the same order and close enough to the same position that the tabs used to be in... does having to click a text link instead of a tab really make Google suddenly unusable? According to some of the people on Slashdot, Metafilter, et al who clearly missed their calling as Google interface engineers, it does.

I also don't understand complaints about the new advertisement formatting; I rarely give Google's ads so much as a glance, even with the new format - the interface is completely consistent. Ads live in a skinny column on the right, so unless you're looking for a sponsored link you know you can safely ignore that side of the page no matter how much its links may look like search results.

Really, it's not The End of the World.