GoogleX |
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GoogleX |
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The mysterious disappearance of GoogleX(March 19 2005) Google’s user interface experiment GoogleX shone brightly but only for a short while.
GoogleX appeared on March 16 and then disappeared the very next day. You can still see how it looked, though. It seemed a good idea – certainly not better than Google’s beloved simplistic standard user interface – but a nice alternative if you want to spice up your search experience a little. So what happened? Why was it announced and then pulled after mere hours? One possible explanation is that it was too similar to Apple’s dock and that Google got a phone call from Apple’s lawyers. Google’s innovations are often conceived by enthusiastic engineers who do not always concern themselves with legal nicities. Quite a lot of web surfers turn off javascript capability in their browser, which leaves this interface useless. This is one of the obvious problems with GoogleX. Another one is that interpretation of images is not universal and people around the world might translate the images into different concepts than the designer intended. Despite these problems, GoogleX is a good idea. It is a fact that a lot of people navigate better using images than text. This might be just the thing for them. And if you are a fan of Apple’s OSX, it feels just like home. This was obviously the intention of the designers from Google labs, because when GoogleX was launched, this little poem could be found at the bottom of the page: "Roses are red. Violets are blue. OS X rocks. Homage to you." Google's own blog has a short entry on GoogleX. The blog entry is written by the engineer who designed GoogleX, Chikai Ohazama, who wrote: "I hope all of you enjoy it - especially Mac users, who I'm sure will appreciate its lineage." Well, we did. It was fun while it lasted.
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It was a variant of Google’s well-known search interface but with images instead of text links for the different choices (image search, Froogle, Google labs and so on). A javascript rollover effect enlarged the images when the mouse passed over them, an effect not unlike the dock in Apple’s OSX.
