

Google's Inevitable Ruin Begins - Deprecated
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2372489,00.asp?kc=PCRSS03079TX1K0000584&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ziffdavis%2Fpcmag%2Fdvorak+%28PCMag.com%3A+the+Official+John+C.+Dvorak+RSS+Feed%29

======
rbarooah
I've found the combination of google instant plus the new previews to be
impressively useful when using Google professionally.

I'm working with clojure at the moment which is new to me, so I find myself
doing a lot of rapid-fire Google searches to answer "is there a library for
x?" or "how do I do y?" like questions.

Before instant and preview, I'd typically do a search and then open a list of
the most promising answers in tab - and then possibly do the same with other
variants of the search. Then I'd use keyboard shortcuts to move through the
tabs and close the irrelevant ones.

Now, I've found that I can usually refine the search to a single good one
using instant, by looking at the immediate feedback of the results being
returned, and preview lets me quickly see which of the results are junk and
which are actually salient before I even get as far as opening them in a tab.

They've made an operation that I do many times a day considerably faster and
more interactive and reduced the cognitive load. This is usability where it
matters - bringing information closer to my mind so I can get things done
quicker.

Most impressive to me is that these improvements seem make a more significant
difference for the long tail of professional work, rather than the more
trivial searches for new products or celebrity gossip etc. I'm thankful to see
Google choosing this as a priority.

I'm reminded of the famous Steve Jobs story about faster boot times saving
lives:
[http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Saving_Lives.txt)

Google's saving lives too.

------
werthog
JD;DR. See also:

[http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-should-pull-the-
plug-...](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-should-pull-the-plug-on-the-
iphone) <http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1923151,00.asp>

Has Dvorak ever been right about anything? (And no, he doesn't get credit for
the keyboard layout, that was a different guy.)

~~~
fragmede
Prediction: Apple Computer Corp. will switch to Intel processors within the
next 12 to 18 months.

<http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,939886,00.asp>

(Technically, he was short by 9 months, but Apple did the inconceivable,
eventually.)

~~~
chc
I think this is an instance of the broken clock rule. People had been throwing
this rumor around for years. That he repeated it at some point before it
actually happened (but got the timing wrong even with a big window) is
unremarkable.

For example, the rumor is mentioned (though rightly dismissed as impractical
at the time) in this eWeek article from 2002:
[http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Apple/Apple-Keeps-x86-Torch-Lit-
wit...](http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Apple/Apple-Keeps-x86-Torch-Lit-with-
Marklar/)

~~~
chc
Also, I just double-checked the dates. Apple switched to Intel in January
2006, which is 16 months past the end of his 18-month window, not nine.

------
Deprecated
I don't know if it will bring on ruin, but I certainly found the old image
search much more friendly and usable. Both this and page preview seems like
"another useless feature that someone thinks improves the experience when it
does nothing but show off the fact that someone can code JavaScript or some
other display manipulation language." Clean and fast wins the day with me ...
Duck Duck Go?

~~~
tariq
this. the "improved" image search is terrible. very finicky and even hard to
use--hardly simple.

re: ddg. regular user, but as others have pointed out already the ajax load
for results is annoying (because it's slow and flashy/jerky).

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Note we now have html (non-js) & lite versions at <http://duckduckgo.com/html>
& <http://duckduckgo.com/lite>

~~~
tariq
excellent, just appended '/html' to the default browser search engine url.

would be great if instead of having to use specific urls that this could be
set up as a preference in settings. still, i'm a happy camper :)

~~~
epi0Bauqu
If you hit the front page without JS enabled it will automatically submit to
the html version. And similarly, if you hit it with a textmode browser it will
automatically go to the lite version.

------
qeorge
John Dvorak seems to have an unlimited supply of complaints, and rarely
anything constructive to say.

Wikipedia suggests he's never built anything of his own. Always a bridesmaid,
never a bride. Perhaps that's part of it?

~~~
grantheaslip
It's possible to be a good tech journalist without having coded something
yourself (though that's not to say that Dvorak is a good journalist). Sure, it
would probably be an asset, and a lack of technical context can make people
write some stupid stuff, but not having built something does not automatically
invalidate anyone's opinions.

Most journalists have never worked in their fields, but nobody's complaining
about that. The asinine idea that nobody's allowed to have an opinion about
any tech company without being a programmer is getting old fast.

~~~
qeorge
Absolutely, and I didn't mean to imply otherwise. But Dvorak seems
particularly quick to call tech companies stupid, and I wonder if that's a
result of not having been in the trenches himself.

~~~
grantheaslip
He's pretty much made a career out of making inflammatory statements about
companies whose fans get riled up easily. It's not a result of ignorance, it's
a result of calculated attempts get hits on his articles (I think he's more-
or-less admitted this multiple times). The obvious target has always been
Apple, but Google (espcially Android) fanatics have been equally quick to get
their backs up lately—maybe he's just diversifying.

------
siglesias
This is the man who invented trolling and link-baiting:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOHzHVF-4Mg>

At best it's satire, not to be taken seriously--if you get up in arms about
what he says, he wins and joke's on you.

------
dasil003
Flagged. Anything with Dvorak's name should be auto-flagged. If he ever raises
an argument that's credible to the HN audience than that means he failed his
own quality criteria: that is to write a specious argument designed to appeal
to the uninformed reader but that fails any sort of detailed analysis so hard
that anyone with half a clue who reads it will be compelled to debunk it and
thus angrily drive traffic to the article.

------
mithaler
Rather astonishingly, he presents no data whatsoever on whether users (y'know,
the ones who matter) actually like instant search and the new image search.

Without that, his argument that Google is in some sort of "decline" because of
their introduction can't be taken seriously, and the article is nothing more
than a rant about how he dislikes them. This is a fact about John C. Dvorak,
not Google.

------
ascott
I disagree with the author, and think that he hasn't used google image search
very extensively.

"Instead of the single page of thumbnails, you get over 20 pages of large
thumbnails all on the same huge page."

The (near) endless scrolling model works better for rapidly sorting large sets
of images, not worse.

"There is no information, just endless thumbnails. No sizes, no locations to
scan, nothing! ... Now you have to place the pointer on top of each image for
... size and location information."

If you are optimizing for a an interface for sorting the most images possible,
removing text makes sense to me. Also, sorting options for the image size is
now on the left, which I find more useful than reading text below each image.

The pop-ups also contain controls which the author ignores that are very
handy: similar images, and different sizes of the same image.

------
cullenking
Yeah, a bit shock-jockish, which is funny considering the pcmag source. I
forgot they even existed. Oh, probably because they dropped in relevance like
a friggin rock.

------
bkj123
Putting 'Dvorak' in the title would have saved me some time.

~~~
batasrki
I'd upvote you twice if I could. I actually audibly groaned when I saw who the
author was. Didn't even read the article, I knew it was going to be full of
crap. I can't believe I graced him with a pageview. Ugh.

------
castis
Knowing nothing about the man. I only got through the first paragraph before I
realized the man has no idea what he's talking about. I am not likely to
listen to anything he says says ever again.

Edit: grammar;

------
corin_
Agree with the many other people commenting here that the article was full of
nonsense. And the idea that these changes spell "Google's inevitable ruin" is
pretty hilarious.

That said, I do hate the changes. I found the old image search far nicer to
use. The most important negative change is that when looking for an image, I
like to open up multiple options in new tabs, sort of making a shortlist from
which to chose from later. To do this I, while scanning the images, click on
ones of interest with my middle mouse button. With the new version of Google
images, the images don't become actual hyperlinks until you have hovered over
them for about a second, so there's a considerable delay when trying to open
multiple images in new tabs quickly.

I also dislike the live results stuff, I'm not sure if there's any specific
reason or just because I'm used to the traditional method - I haven't actually
used it nearly enough to know if I'd get used to it, given the chance. I use
<https://encrypted.google.com>, which hasn't rolled out that feature,
thankfully. (Possibly my issue is this: I'm a very fast typer, so I can
complete my exact search query without it taking noticeably longer than
completing half of my query, and it's therefore more efficient to wait until I
get the most accurate results, rather than hoping that a less accurate search
will have found what I'm looking for.)

~~~
drivebyacct2
>With the new version of Google images, the images don't become actual
hyperlinks until you have hovered over them for about a second, so there's a
considerable delay when trying to open multiple images in new tabs quickly.

That is patently untrue.

[source: I just tried. I middle-clicked as many links as I could as fast as I
could. Each one resulted in a new tab instantly]

~~~
corin_
I just tried in Chrome and it's as you said. In Firefox, however, it's a
different story (and FF is my primary browser.)

~~~
drivebyacct2
Oooh. I see.

------
anigbrowl
Some valid usability criticisms, swamped in less useful ones and linkbaity
headers. I actually agree that some of the new features are a little too
bandwidth hungry, but am OK with that because I want to see greater demand for
last mile broadband on the west coast. Reading about the speeds available on
FIOS makes me cry.

I'm surprised he didn't take a few stabs at Google News, which really does
have fundamental problems. He has touched on them [1] but the criticisms are
rather shallow and miss the mark.

1\. <http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2363874,00.asp>.

I don't like seeing Dvorak called a troll. Disclosure: I wrote for PC Mag in
London for a while, so there's a bit of collegiality at work, but I've always
seen him as a gadfly - a literary nickname for the horsefly, an annoying
creature that buzzes and has a painful bite, but which perform useful
functions of pollination, providing forensic evidence, and contribute to the
weeding out evolutionary misfits. Trolls (by my definition) deliberately seek
to mislead or irritate others for amusement's sake - occasionally everyone's,
but usually only their own. Dvorak honestly thinks the things he complains
about are broken, even if he's often wrong about how, why or what extent. He
is the Ur-User :-)

------
xiaoma
Yes! I agree completely with this. I was just trying to do an image search on
google earlier today and it drove me nuts having to hover over each image to
see the size and then get shunted off to some weird ajax light box display
after finally picking one.

It was bad enough that I abandoned the google search and went to baidu, which
was actually the more minimalist option for once.

------
guscost
I'm not going to actually go check, but I'm pretty sure the images still load
one page at a time, when you scroll to the bottom of the last page (or
farther). How can you have a job at PCMag and not acknowledge or even be aware
of this?

------
Incubus
Old men don't like it when things change, and assert their opinion as fact,
trust me.

~~~
ergo98
Old men? You could have just said _people_ and been done with it. When
Facebook moves a button there is outrage and mass demonstrations. You younguns
and your confirmation bias. Amiright?

------
kin
I've been impressed by both the new image search and the web previews. With
the introduction of Rock Melt, the instant page preview while simultaneously
browsing my searches was a productive environment and now Google added it to
their page.

The image search I feel is even faster now that I don't have to click through
every single page. Before I used Cool Iris. The whole point of image search is
supposed to be a visual experience. If you liked an image, check its size.
Also, why is his browser crashing? What's he using?

------
jameskilton
Hahaha, just a few days ago this article hit
[http://www.fastcompany.com/1701119/adwords-is-dying-and-
goog...](http://www.fastcompany.com/1701119/adwords-is-dying-and-google-knows-
it-and-they-are-doing-something-about-it)

which is a LOT better look into what Google is doing and why. The sky is not
falling Dvorak, never has been, never will be.

------
kristaps
Technology people may not like Google's recent work (me included), but two
things must be kept in mind:

1\. techies are the minority

2\. Google is said to split test heavily, maybe even pathologically

So if a new feature stays it's probably because non-technical people liked it
and Google is probably doing the right thing from a business perspective.

------
joblessjunkie
I like some of Google's recent changes, but I must agree that the new Google
image search is a mess. I much prefer the old one.

~~~
treeface
I don't really understand people's complaints on this issue. How could you not
prefer to have hundreds of images on one page instead of clicking for the next
page over and over? It's the difference between a mousewheel scroll and
click/scroll, click/scroll.

~~~
joblessjunkie
My complaints are mostly around the Javascript mess that has stolen our direct
access to the images.

The image I want is usually in the top row of results anyway, so an endless
collection of thumbnails isn't much help.

I don't want to view an image in some kind of weird half-sized shadow box. I
want to see it alone, at full size -- or directly download it. In the old
Google image search, these tasks were as easy as a right click on a context
menu.

Now we get strange hover boxes that are only 50% larger than the thumbnails,
and clicking a thumbnail takes you to a confusing pseudo-page that isn't the
full size image, nor the actual source site. Who does this help?

------
DanI-S
OMG something changed, the end is nigh.

------
pyre
Apple is dead! Long live Windows! BSD is dying! NetCraft confirms it!

... and now:

Google is dying! John C Dvorak^W^W^WAn internet troll confirms it!

------
hyperbovine
Just when I was going to sell my Google stock, Dvorak goes and pays it his
highest complement. Guess I'll wait a few more months...

------
aristidb
You know a writer does not have a convincing case when he adds "trust me" to
the first paragraph.

------
roadnottaken
I think Google deserves the benefit of the doubt, for now.

------
louisalley
dvorak is a troll

------
ergo98
Dvorak could legitimately be described as a professional troll.

 _"you get over 20 pages of large thumbnails all on the same huge page....And
because thousands of useless large thumbnails are loaded, a huge waste of user
bandwidth takes place each time."_

Beware commenting on things you don't understand, because often it just makes
you look like a fool.

In this case, Dvorak apparently didn't notice that while all of the images
"were on" the same page, they were simply placeholders until you scroll.

If an image exists outside of the viewport, does it exist? Not necessarily.

As to them being large images....welcome to the high speed world, John. We've
graduated beyond dial-up.

 _"So instead of being able to scan the entire page with a simple glance to
find an image from say, usgs.gov, you have to put the cursor on each and every
image and wait for a pop out with the information."_

Who searches for images by domain like that? Few users of Google image search,
I suspect, with the average user casually looking for some images to "borrow"
for their book report or blog. The source domain just doesn't really matter to
most users, again speculating (though presumably Google has actually verified
this).

But say you really want to see images from usgs.gov? site:usgs.gov, e.g.
[http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=site%3Ausgs.gov+...](http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=site%3Ausgs.gov+cheese&);

And of course you can search by size (larger than, or a specific absolute
size), and so on.

There will always ( _always_ ) be people who complain about change. John, in
this case, is just plying his trollish trade, however.

~~~
jshen
Beware splitting hairs when you are ignoring the main point. The new google
image search is worse than the old one imo so dvorak's point stands even if he
got a few technical details wrong.

I also agree with him that it's a bad sign when a company seems to be doing
things just because their competitors did something similar.

~~~
ergo98
_Beware splitting hairs when you are ignoring the main point_

Splitting hairs?

These are the specific things that he complains about being wrong with the new
version, and they're ignorant bullshit.

 _The new google image search is worse than the old one imo_

I think the new image search is vastly improved. I doubt I'm alone. For the
purpose of finding images it is much more efficient and usable, and if you
want advanced searching, it's still there for your advanced searching needs.

But of course, we're just two people with subjective feelings. If Google
changed it back, however, I wouldn't cry like a baby and pound my fists
because it no longer specifically targets me and my personal usage needs.

It is human nature that whenever something changes the complainers tend to be
the loudest. The fact that _you_ don't personally like it, and Dvorak affirms
your opinion, says absolutely nothing to whether it was a good move for Google
or the average user.

Though I have no doubt that everyone with a gripe with Google's image search
changes will we drawn into this discussion to add their "Rah rah yah yah!" I
hope we're all wise enough to know how to judge that and to not overestimate
the scope of that group.

It's also suspect to argue that they did it "just because their competitors
are doing it". Could it be that the state of the art on the tubes is
improving? Did Apple add multitasking to the iPhone just because Android did
it, or because it's actually a good feature to have?

~~~
jamn
I wouldn't first argue that Dvorak spits out 'ignorant bullshit' while
claiming that all design preferences are equally valid.

I personally prefer the older Google Images. For one, I lose the ability to
scroll the website immediately after finding it. I do this, for example, when
I'm searching for some algorithm by first finding a diagram that I think is
clearer and then going directly to read the explanation, or when searching for
a recipe by looking for the image first.

I find the new interface to be slightly cluttered to use (with all the
animations and uncomfortable feeling when scrolling), At some point, Yahoo
(and others) had pretty cluttered interfaces and people eventually shifted to
Google, commonly citing simplicity. For this reason, I find that taking the
leap to 'everyone complains about changes' to trivialize the fact that many
people may, in fact, appreciate simple interfaces.

There sometimes is a superior interface, and discussing the pros and cons of a
new interface is very valuable.

~~~
ergo98
_I wouldn't first argue that Dvorak spits out 'ignorant bullshit' while
claiming that all design preferences are equally valid._

Indeed. So who claimed that all design preferences are equally valid? Oddly
you seem to be inferring that _I_ did, but I actually didn't, making your
lead-in just some noise in hope of soliciting a bias from readers.

 _At some point, Yahoo (and others) had pretty cluttered interfaces and people
eventually shifted to Google, commonly citing simplicity_

But can you see that perhaps Google was pursuing simplicity by making their
image search all about the images themselves? Further they made perusing large
sets of images simpler.

For users who don't care about source pixel sizes or originating domains --
which I suspect is most -- that was just distracting noise on the page. Google
simplified the search to a dense, and often beautiful, collection of images,
with some powerful functionality on the left.

 _For this reason, I find that taking the leap to 'everyone complains about
changes' to trivialize the fact that many people may, in fact, appreciate
simple interfaces._

Everyone complains about changes, good or bad. That is a simple truism of the
world. It does _not_ trivialize the usability of the interface, which is why I
specifically talked about the usability of the interface -- all Dvorak cares
about is what used to be there and now isn't. He doesn't care about the
advantages of the new interface, because all he's focused on is the negative
change (for him).

It's ignorant bullshit.

------
drivebyacct2
This article is awful. Terrible, terrible awful.

------
clistctrl
Personally I love the new google images. However I would quickly point out
that some of the reasons people have left google is their frustration with the
magnitude google relies on "the numbers" I highly doubt that the changes are
hurting them, becuase if they were... they wouldn't keep it.

