Copying Bing

Every other search engine seemed to go into that direction. Categories make sense that it should help guide you drill down into what you are looking for. Then when Google comes out, it take a totally different approach and keeps it clean. Removes all types of categorization and uses the power of search. Google from the very beginning was banking on the fact that their search is sooo powerful, it is easy to drill down into what you are looking for by simply typing in your search query and that their results are so relevant, you do not need to drill down that deep.

Yahoo and Microsoft Copy Google

The minimalist, clean, simple interface has always worked with Google. Showing the robustness of their search engine algorithm more than anything else that many people really liked which is responsible for all of Google initial boost to success. So if that is the proper formula, they are probably doing something good, so Yahoo and Microsoft have briefly tried it out.

Yahoo still has their clean version still up on http://search.yahoo.com.

It was difficult finding old screenshots, and here is one of the older versions of Microsoft Live Search with the clean interface.

Was Clusty First?

After some time, even if Yahoo and Microsoft made the Google looking search interfaces, it didnt seem to work for them the same way it was working for Google since they never stuck to that interface. The default Yahoo.com screen is still busy as even. Microsoft kept MSN still busy, killed Live search and made Bing simply with a big random postcard at the back of it.

Through the years everyone was also copying the standard search result layout. Where organic results were, and were sponsored listings are along with accompanying eyetracking heatmap data proving their effectiveness.

Probably not many of you now about Clusty, I have no accurate data saying they were the first to do this, but as far as I remember, Clusty was the first I saw displaying search results with clusters, hence the name Clusty. These cluster were nothing but categories of the search results which can guide users to drill down on what they are really looking for.

Although drill downs were implemented in some way on Google, Yahoo and MSN as related searches and not really categories and were not highlighted on the sidebar.

Today, Live Search and now Bing makes it a standard. They have been moving away from the minimalist search result interface and started integrating a lot in the search engine results. And as I have seen their presentations in various conferences, they back up their search results layout that has categories on the side with eye tracking heat map data and other user testing saying that these categories really help users get to what they are searching for.

Are they right? Maybe, they could be. And it even reaches a point that Google might consider this as well. Right now there are tons of post talking about the preview of Googles new search result interface showing a side bar. It does not seem to be categories, but just repositioning the Web, Images, Video, News, etc options from the top to the side. I first read about it here, hat tip to AJ Batac, but somehow I am not able to recreate this on my browsers. I search online about this and there are numerous post about it and I guess the post would not get this many if it didnt work at all...

Can you recreate the new Google sidebar search result layout? If you can what did you do? If you think this is a hoax, tell me about it also. Share your thoughts.

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Tag: Google, Bing

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