Google Can Make the U.I. for the Web
Greg Linden has posted some interesting notes and thoughts on the future of Google, which originated from an analyst’s presentation that Google gave on Friday. While there’s a lot of stuff in it, the thing that caught my eye was the following note to slide number 12, which spoke of different ways that Google could improve its search: “User Interface: Experiment with several new UI features to make the user experience better.”
As some of you may know from my long, rambling post, Think Desire, I’m interested in the user inteface of the Web itself. This is not the U.I. of the individual web pages, but the user interface for that unvisualized, and hence, unexperienced, virtual space between the pages. I imagine this space almost as a series of tunnels, like the jetstream the turtles surf in Finding Nemo, and which looks similar to the Macintosh screen saver, Plasma Tunnel. I envision seeing it form and disform, as if entering and exiting it, when a user clicks on a link to go to a new page, experiencing the tunnel in the time it takes the browser to load the next page — the loading time will be experienced as distance traveled, and return the spatial dimension to hyperspace.
I imagined that this process would have to occur at the level of the browser. I even nicknamed my imaginary browser as iFlow, and gave it a complete, thematic U.I. of its own. But after reading Greg’s post about the future of Google, I realized that Google could implement the idea if it wanted to.
Imagine going to Google and entering in your search terms. Instead of the page loading a complete list of results, Google opens up a space behind your term, and you look down a long expanse of a tunnel. The tiles of the tunnel are the different web pages. The most relevant are closest to you, and the less relevant are farther away.
There has to be some way to retain the quick skimming factor of the typical results list; perhaps the results list manifests on a semi-transparent filter between you and the tunnel, and when you hover over one of the results, its corresponding tile in the tunnel lights up, or better, it zooms off the tunnel and appears in a reasonablly sized thumbnail just in front of the transparent filter, giving you even more context than what’s available in the results list. Actually clicking on the result makes both the thumbnail and the filter disappear, and you propel into the tunnel, taking only as much time to get to the proper place in the tunnel as your computer needs to load and render the new page. When you click on a link on the page you found, you “descend” into the tunnel again only to be taken to the page you clicked on.
The interesting thing for Google here is that such an experience will only be accessible through Google, as if it was the only interesting entryway into the World Wide Web. MSN and Yahoo can get you the page you want too, but only Google will give you the experience of the Web.
Now that would be cool. And it would be an awfully creative business move.