The Iron Yuppie

Google Blog: "That's why we keep building more advanced systems for crawling the web and creating more sophisticated indices to sort what we find. So 8 billion pages is a milestone worth noting, but it's not the end of the road. The real test is how well we do in finding what you want from within those pages. We'll keep improving that too. "

I was all set to blog about this until I got to this last line. This philosophy makes me smile more than anything else he said. Computer programs are so often engineered for unlimited flexibility with thousands of options. But, exactly as you see here, people do not want thousands of options, they want one; the one that they are looking for. Designing products to always offer that one option that people want would be fantastic, no matter how many widgets and features the product has. If they're looking at a window with a thousand buttons, the users are probably going to be a lot less happy than if they're looking at a window with two. I know that's a fairly simplistic way of looking at things, but it captures a thought process that a lot of designers would be right to heed. Of course knowing what that one right thing is key... and that's what Google has done so well here. People go to a search engine; they want to find something. Pretty cool.