I have been following articles from user interface design communities very closely of late. Especially on what makes a great website - great. Is it about colors? or jazzy looking buttons? or speed? I could recollect a Steve Jobs quote on the word Design, which goes like this:
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
I do believe that there is more to do with design in addition to making it look good. The word 'great' comes from different people for different reasons. Here goes one reason behind why Google Search is great. Now tell me something. What can we do with a HTML text box? Type a name? mobile phone
number? sounds insignificant right? Looks weird to see someone blog
about it. I mean, what can one text box do at all?
Someone thought so, and did miracles with it. It is quite captivating to see that the world's most visited website - Google.com has only one text box in it's home page. It appears so but under the hood, there lies an amazing design which performs many different tasks based on the search term. We all know we can search for information on Google but many of us do not know all the features it comes with.
Two years back, I wrote a blog on How Google search works but I did not mention the features then. Here is a compiled list of many cool features.
Click on the links to see it in action.
Click on the links to see it in action.
| Feature description | preview link |
|---|---|
| Localization is one key feature of Google. When you search for weather, it returns weather detail for the given location. | weather bangalore |
| The word MOVIES followed by City name will return showtimes for the present day. | movies chennai |
| The word sunrise or sunset followed by city name will get the timings! Best thing to know if you are visiting Kanyakumari! | sunrise kanyakumari |
| The word time will give current time along with Timezone. Helps avoid scaring out people at midnight while making an overseas phone call! | time georgia |
| Starting search with site: followed by a website name will return results only from that website. I use it to find posts in my own blog! | site:vikkee.com google |
| Giving Stock Quotes will return latest trend of that share. | MSFT |
| Live Sports score will come when you enter the team names. Since all the sport website are blocked by the proxy server @ work, I use to check scores for the ongoing India-Australia test series with this! | ind vs aus |
| There is a lovely calculator inside. Just type an expression, and off you go! | 5*9+(sqrt 10)^3= |
| Unit conversions can’t get any easier! If your kid is in high school, don’t show this. s/he will become google-dependent for homeworks! | 30.48 cm in feet 100 USD in INR |
| Thanks to organizations that expose public data. Population, Unemployment rate – it’s all available. | population india unemployment rate america |
| Looking for something specific? Type it along with place name and pincode. | gym chennai 600041 |
| To learn more about a disease/problem, put the name of it, and you could see it’s symptom/treatment/test/Complications etc., | Mitral valve prolapse |
| Travel planning has become very easy now. You can check flight status, and timings just by keying in the name! | american airlines 18 flights from chennai to bangalore |
| using related: along with a website will give you list of sites that are relevant to it. Sydney Morning Herald is a famous Australian News paper. To get all such newspapers, use this! | related:www.smh.com.au related:cricinfo.com |
| A new addition to search is the Best Guess feature. Ask a question and it will try it’s best. This simplifies searching! | who is apple ceo billa2 release |
All these things happen after you click the Search button. The engine running inside somehow works out what you wanted to do, and invokes that particular piece of software code to get you the results!
Think about a Google search homepage with 20 different text boxes – one each for features such as weather, time, flight schedule, and population! The page will look cluttered, and every time we have to think where to type. We all know how many buttons calculators have, but this one is absolutely simple. We must appreciate the people who does all this under-the-hood stuff! This is what I will call Great Design.
Some more design concepts from this blog post:
It actually took me 5 hours to finish writing this post. I was looking for the best way to present this content. I thought about bulleted points, screen shots of various search results but finally decided to have a simple table which will have a short description along with a link to show you how it works. Clicking all these links would not take more than 5 minutes whereas the reader trying it out himself would take a longer time. In fact he would not even try all of it since there is some amount of laziness in every human being. Having screenshots here would lead to a longer post and the reader has to scroll a lot. No one likes reading longer posts. Table is short, and solves the purpose well. This is the first time I am using a TABLE in my blog, and wrote some CSS for a decent looking table layout! If 1000 people read this post, then I have saved the world – 10,000 minutes. That tells something about design. It's not about developer's comfort but the end user's!
