Am I the only one or are others feeling underwhelmed by this week’s “partnership” between Google and cartoonist Scott Adams on the Google logo? I’ve always quite enjoyed the different logo variations that Google has created for holidays and events and such, which have been inventive and quirky (even more amusement can be found by looking at various Google logos created by fans, most of which are horribly bad). But I’m just not finding these Dilbert doodlings, which Google calls “spectacular work,” very funny. Now admittedly I’m not someone who pays much attention to the Dilbert strip (or any comic strip for that matter, surprise surprise) — I also hated the movie Office Space, fyi — and so I can probably be rightly accused of just not getting it, but they hardly seem worth getting in the first place.
I did find Wednesday’s logo (wherein Dilbert suggests shortening the logo to “Goo”) slightly amusing, but only because one of the major search engine/portal sites in Japan is called “Goo,” probably something not known by Adams (though hopefully known by Google).
I am heartened however to know that my original fears when first seeing the doodles on Monday, that Google was indeed going to change their logo, were unfounded. While I much prefer the look of the home page before they added those hideous navigation tabs above the search box, it’s still a wonderfully pleasant page to look at. The day Google’s home page becomes “portalized” will be a sad sad day for the Web indeed.
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The real interesting goings-on at Google this week revolve around their opening up of Google Labs, their “technology playground,” to the public for a look around and hopefully some beta testing. The sites must have been slammed yesterday (not surprising considering the Labs were dominating the top spots at Daypop and Blogdex) because they were inaccessible everytime I tried, but today I’ve been able to poke around a bit.
Google Glossary has the potential to replace what I normally use Google’s web search to do now, which is look up words and terms I’m not familiar with, like “blog”. I like that the descriptions are returned on the results page so I don’t have to click off (unless I want to) to the site that is the source. I didn’t like that the sites returned seem fairly arbitrary (one of the sites for “kanji” starts with this description: “Borrowed Chinese script and a pain in the ass to deal with.”).
Google Sets allows a user to create groupings of related items based on a few terms (for example, entering in “BMW” and “Audi” would allow one to get a bigger listing of automobile brands). However, clearly these beta tools need a ways to go before they make it to prime-time (if indeed they ever do, Google warns us not to be surprised if one day they simply disappear off the site). In Sets, I entered in “Burma,” “Thailand,” and “Laos,” hoping to get a bigger listing of Southeast Asia countries. I did get a list with other SE Asian countries, but included in the “set” were also “Textiles,” “Linguistics,” and “Fiction,” not exactly what I was looking for.
I couldn’t try out Voice Search as it requires calling a number in California (not sure I see the point of it anyway, why would I call in my search and then use a computer to display the results?), and played around just barely with Keyboard Shortcuts (interesting enough I suppose).
