Google Starts Trends
The early days of search pre-Google days were all about crowded interfaces with tons of things going on the page. This was when the main players in the space were Yahoo and Altavista, and those trying to keep up with the page were Excite, Hotbot, Lycos and other. Many of them started with categories displayed since most of these search engines really started as directories.
January 1997 screenshot of Yahoo taken by Ice House Designs
Every other search engine seemed to go into that direction. Categories make sense that it should help guide you drill down into what you are looking for. Then when Google comes out, it take a totally different approach and keeps it clean. Removes all types of categorization and uses the power of search. Google from the very beginning was banking on the fact that their search is sooo powerful, it is easy to drill down into what you are looking for by simply typing in your search query and that their results are so relevant, you do not need to drill down that deep.
Google Beta in 1999 - Screenshot by Chron Tech Blog.
Yahoo and Microsoft Copy Google
The minimalist, clean, simple interface has always worked with Google. Showing the robustness of their search engine algorithm more than anything else that many people really liked which is responsible for all of Google initial boost to success. So if that is the proper formula, they are probably doing something good, so Yahoo and Microsoft have briefly tried it out. Yahoo still has their clean version still up on http://search.yahoo.com.
Yahoo's Clean Search Interface
It was difficult finding old screenshots, and here is one of the older versions of Microsoft Live Search with the clean interface.
Old Microsoft Live Search with a simple clean interface. Screenshot saved by Guardian.co.uk.
Was Clusty First?
After some time, even if Yahoo and Microsoft made the Google looking search interfaces, it didn’t seem to work for them the same way it was working for Google since they never stuck to that interface. The default Yahoo.com screen is still busy as even. Microsoft kept MSN still busy, killed Live search and made Bing simply with a big random postcard at the back of it. Through the years everyone was also copying the standard search result layout. Where organic results were, and were sponsored listings are along with accompanying eyetracking heatmap data proving their effectiveness. Probably not many of you now about Clusty, I have no accurate data saying they were the first to do this, but as far as I remember, Clusty was the first I saw displaying search results with clusters, hence the name Clusty. These cluster were nothing but categories of the search results which can guide users to drill down on what they are really looking for.
Sample search results of Clusty showing it's search result categories.
Although drill downs were implemented in some way on Google, Yahoo and MSN as related searches and not really categories and were not highlighted on the sidebar. Today, Live Search and now Bing makes it a standard. They have been moving away from the minimalist search result interface and started integrating a lot in the search engine results. And as I have seen their presentations in various conferences, they back up their search results layout that has categories on the side with eye tracking heat map data and other user testing saying that these categories really help users get to what they are searching for. Are they right? Maybe, they could be. And it even reaches a point that Google might consider this as well. Right now there are tons of post talking about the preview of Google’s new search result interface showing a side bar. It does not seem to be categories, but just repositioning the Web, Images, Video, News, etc options from the top to the side. I first read about it here, hat tip to AJ Batac, but somehow I am not able to recreate this on my browsers. I search online about this and there are numerous post about it and I guess the post would not get this many if it didn’t work at all, but it supposed to look like this:
Google Search Result Interface with Sidebar. Screenshot by AJ Batac for The Web Shop.
Can you recreate the new Google sidebar search result layout? If you can what did you do? If you think this is a hoax, tell me about it also. Share your thoughts.
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Tags: Bing, Clusty, Google, Live Search, Microsoft, MSN, Yahoo
Hi Benj. Interesting article. Minor corrections: Clusty is a branding introduced for a search engine called Vivisimo (from a company of the same name). Vivisimo has been around for a few years longer than Clusty, but other niche search engines with search results clustering have been present from around the same time (ca 2000), including Carrot2, Clusterizer/iBoogie (not functional anymore), Kartoo, etc.
Nice, thanks Dawid for the information.