Wednesday, May 23, 2007

inconsistent googling

Google recently revamped its search portal to allow you to issue searches across more of its data stores. This extends behaviour you saw before when you extended searches from the Web to Google Groups. All you had to do after seeing the Web search results was to select the Groups option from the dropdown at the top and Google would issue the search across all the newsgroups it offered/archived. You could then select the Web option to return to your original search results.

The recent portal changes have affected that final return. If you now select the Web option to return to your original search results, Google takes you to its main page with the search words intact in the text box, but you have to click the "Google Search" button again in order to see your Web search results. Minor usability annoyance. Things work fine if your order of operations is Web->Groups->News or Web->News->Groups. Consistency begs that the extra click for the Web path be eliminated.

update [june 05, 2007]: I just played with the sequence of operations and it looks like the inconsistency has been addressed. Cool!

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