Well, yes … for the South Koreans, anyway. From an article in the FT:
“I love Naver because everything I need is conveniently shown on the first page,” says Hwang Ji-sun, a 22-year-old college student in Seoul. “I get everything from news, shopping advice, the latest entertainment gossip, interesting pictures and hot search words. On Google you see nothing but a search box.”
Naver is to South Korea, as Google is to the Western World: the place where almost all internet searching starts. There is, however, a clear difference between the two companies on how they view their users’ needs. Naver.com is a home page to users, with a lot of “interesting” content. Google.com is for search, and search alone.
Which prompts me to wonder … if this interface …
… can essentially be reduced to this …
… is the page “www.google.com” even needed anymore? Is there a point to it?
I think the answer is clearly no. And as added proof, the last time I went to www.google.com – aside from going there to take a screen shot for this blog post – was easily months ago.
This then leads to another question: Why not make iGoogle, for example, be what appears when you navigate to “www.google.com? Is there any value to users leaving it as it is, with just a search box and some links?
Methinks not.
Naver Google Again
As always, thanks for listening.
~alex
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I think most serious Web junkies, like you and I, don’t need a page at Google.com. However, many users do. For example, my father starts every single search at Google.com, even though I’ve showed him the Google search bar several times. And, nearly every day, I witness colleagues visit Google.com and type the URL they want to visit in the search box rather than directly into their browser’s address bar!
Point being, while the functionality or utility of google.com might be negligible to you and me, to many surfers, that little page on the Web is the starting point for nearly everything they do; any transition away from it would be slow and risky for Google.
True, good point. I still wonder, though, if that page can easily be duplicated by a single search bar in the browser, whether the value of the page isn’t vulnerable.
~alex
This post was re-published at Alt Search Engine. There are other comments there.
http://altsearchengines.com/2008/01/02/google-not-usable-%e2%80%a6-pshaw-%e2%80%a6-seriously/
I guess I’m not sure what getting rid of the page buys you. For people who use the toolbar, great. For people who use the Web page, great. Get rid of the Web page, and you only risk losing users. And I suppose Google would always have some sort of home page, so why wouldn’t they have a search box on it?
Mebbe I’m being dense :)
Dense? You, Michael? Never.
The only point is that the page risks not being very valuable to users. You and I don’t go there anymore. Some “newbies” still do, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see those numbers go down as people begin to discover other ways of searching (via toolbar, for example). Or using other Google pages – like Google Finance and iGoogle – as their home pages.
I guess it’s just striking to me that such an iconic page on the internet risks being, well, I don’t know, just not that valuable to people anymore. And of course I’m not talking about today, but in maybe 3 years or so. I can’t imagine it’ll be the same as it is today.
But you never know.
~alex
Gotcha, and agreed. One thought, though: I believe Google has been fortunate to fly below the radar on the anti-monopoly front. This may not always be the case, and in fact they are starting to face more scrutiny in Europe. If they ditch the Web page and rely solely on a proprietary search bar in every browser out there, they could draw exactly the kind of attention they need to avoid.
One more thought: I know several non-newbies (i.e., propellorheads) who use iGoogle as their primary portal to the Web, custom configuring it with their email dashboard, chat client, weather, stocks, etc. For them, the Google page, so modified, is a staple of their online life.
Interesting. I hadn’t thought about the monopoly angle.
I like the iGoogle page. And part of what I wonder about is whether iGoogle will ever replace the http://www.google.com page.
~alex