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Fix the Search Interface First

Barry Diller wants Ask.com to grow market share. I'm sure there's lots to be done on improving distribution deals, the crawler, back-end algorithms, etc., but how about starting with some simple, obvious UI fixes? Here are the results of a search for "Search Engine" on the 4 majors:

jeeves.001.jpg

jeeves.002.jpg

jeeves.003.jpg

jeeves.004.jpg

At 1024×768, the UI differences are glaring. I've marked the ads in red and the information of dubious value in blue. The green checks indicate relevant, high-quality results.

To the average surfer, the info in white is all that matters. Note to everyone else except Google - fix the UI first - it's the low-hanging fruit.

Posted on Monday, December 19, 2005 at 08:15PM by Registered CommenterStartupBoy in | Comments7 Comments

Reader Comments (7)

I have to agree. Google understands the value prop to it's users better than the other search sites.
December 21, 2005 | Unregistered CommenterPeter O
amen. i've been saying this for awhile...its amazing how bad the user experience is on google's direct competitors.
December 22, 2005 | Unregistered Commenterchad
Nice observation, but some users may actually also decide on the quality of results. Having ignored anything apart from Google, I have found offlate that Yahoo Search actually yields more precise results. Yet a cleaner search UI page almost always lets me Google first.
December 29, 2005 | Unregistered CommenterDebashish
Where is the rss feed on this website???
December 31, 2005 | Unregistered CommenterP
I've added an XML button in the upper right. You can also go to:

http://www.startupboy.com/journal/rss.xml

Thanks for subscribing!
January 2, 2006 | Registered CommenterStartupBoy
This is not really a fair/realistic comparision. Try a commercial query like digital camera, or even a search for "photo hosting" etc. You'll see that google has ton of ads.
March 14, 2006 | Unregistered CommenterRavi Dronamraju
Ravi,

True, commercial queries are a mess everywhere. Also note that Ask and MSN have radically improved their UIs since this posting.
March 14, 2006 | Registered CommenterStartupBoy

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