The Downtempo Blog

I’ve been participating in a discussion going over at DesignADay about the design of Google’s Advanced Search feature (be sure to read the original article).  The discussion uses Disqus for comments, and I’m experimenting with their comment reblogging feature:

When Google first added Advanced Search features in August of 2000, the link was much larger and much more prominent:

http://web.archive.org/web/20000815052943/http:…

But just a few months later, it had shrunk off to the right:

http://web.archive.org/web/20001027222150/www.g…

Why?

The obvious reason is that advanced search is hard, people want instant gratification, and people don’t use it.

Do you remember the feeling of glee the first time you punched a UPS tracking number into a google search box? Or more simply “weather 75248″? This is the kind of advanced search that most users what. “Dear Google, please figure out what I want. kthxby”

The other, more subtle reason, is that for almost all users the advanced search link does not drive scalable engagement. It doesn’t drive future engagement, because it is a slow laborious process to enter the search terms. It isn’t scalable because every search becomes a beautiful, unique snowflake that is impossible to cache and uses “off the beaten path” blocks of the code base.

Giving lightning fast results to simple queries benefits both me the user, my community of other users like me, and therefore Google itself. Advanced search on the other hand, really only benefits me. Google reaps only a tiny incremental increase in the total number of searches for an awful lot of work.

We’ve all heard tales of Google’s obsession with measurement. I suspect that the Advanced Link of Diminutive Size shrank because people just don’t use it.

Originally posted as a comment by marshalldt on DesignAday using Disqus.

Let me know what you think of the comment reblogging.  I’m still trying to decide what I think of it.