Google's Advanced Search Redesign Does Little For Average User

I'm always suprised when Google makes a change to an existing product. Maybe it's because of all the rumors that I've heard about how the search engine giant is a little cocky about how well they know their technology. Or maybe it's because I use their services so much that even the slightest modification rocks my world.

That was what it was like the other day when I went to use Google's Advanced Search. I wanted to do a site-specific search. When I got to the page I found that the entire page had been redesigned. "But why?" I thought. "They've moved everything around."

Then I looked at the page from a developer's standpoint. It is certainly cleaner. The old interface had so many fields and almost as many dropdowns. It looked like it could have been devised by the IRS.

It turns out that Google was targeting that interface with the redesign. According to the Google Operating System blog, "Google's Daniel Russell said that 50% of the people who open the Advanced Search page leave it without completing the search." Russell apparently hinted that the exits "most likely [are] because they [the users] are overwhelmed by the Advanced Search interface."

If you ask me, though, Google didn't take this redesign far enough. Yes, cleaning up the interface was helpful. But who did it help? The 0.5% of users who already know how to use advanced search features. Sun Microsystems Director of Web Technologies Tim Bray says:

The people who do use Advanced Search are your most fanatical users, the professional librarians, spooks, and private investigators. And the ones who will do what it takes to find out everything about research on the rare disease their child just got diagnosed with (1).

The average user on the other hand, often doesn't fully understand how a search engine works in the first place. According to usability expert Jacob Nielsen, "many users don't understand how search engines prioritize their listings, and some users don't even know that the euphemistic label 'sponsored links' refers to paid advertisements.(2)."

Google has an Advanced Search Tips page, but I found instructions from a site called Google Guide to be much less intimidating and more hands-on for the beginner.

How can Google improve the usability on the Advanced Search page itself? I have a radical response to that question. But I'll blog more on that tomorrow.