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Google bought Doubleclick for 3 odd billion

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it's possible that Google thought that the combination of Microsoft+Doubleclick would be more evil than Google+Doubleclick

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You do disable cookies for Google, right.. ?

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can't get over the price. $3B. More than AMD paid for ATI.

Yeah, and they got ripped off. But nVidia would have been much much more expensive. AMD definitely needed to by a graphics chip company and unfortunately for them there were only two real candidates. One good but super-expensive one, and one crappy but only very-expensive one.
AMD should have purchased nVidia 4-5 years ago, but hindsight is 20/20.

Anyway, back to DoubleClick and Google...
I read that when the bidding got to $2B, Microsoft said "too rich for my blood" and folded their hand. While Google is more like a 12-year-old who just inherited a fortune from a distant relative and is busy blowing it on candy and trinkets.

I suppose at $3B Google isn't getting very much "Evil per dollar"

1. Uncluttered front page
   
2. gmail
   
3. Google Spreadsheet
   

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oh, man. must think happy thoughts, must think happy thoughts. fingers in ears. la la la la la.

Quick, here are 3 things I still like about Google.

1. Uncluttered front page
   

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oh, man. must think happy thoughts, must think happy thoughts. fingers in ears. la la la la la.

Quick, here are 3 things I still like about Google.

1. Uncluttered front page
   

I spoke too soon.
Today a "menu bar" appeared on the Google front page.

Is this simply a well-reasoned organization of a clean and simple interface?

Or is it the first stumble on a downslide leading eventually to a front page cluttered with Flash animations of dancing wombats, 32-point red blink tags, 19 layers of frames, slow-loading cascading mouse-over menus, an embedded sound-clip, a stock ticker scrolling across the bottom, and of course, the entire search box and search button embedded inside of a Flash or Java app that you can't even access until you click through two pages of interstitial banners. (I.e., think Yahoo or Ebay)

Time will tell.

Anyway, one down, two to go.

Or as we say on this side of the Atlantic: "Steeeerike One"

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those evil bastards moved the "Web - Images - Groups - Etc." links from between the Google logo and the search field to the top of the screen. I'm tellin' ya, it's probably only a matter of moments until you hear the jackboots kicking in your door.

I hear ya, man! It's definitely one of the signs of the Apocalypse!

(Something tells me I forget to put a smiley after my earlier overreaction.)

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Isn't there enough negative in the world without all this "Me Too!" FUD?

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Jakob Nielsen

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Jakob Nielsen

Master of minimalist, usable, UGLY-ASS design.

I wanted to quickly point out here that I didn't mean to imply I was on board whatsoever with Nielsens' "UGLY-ASS minimalism." Nielsen has a lot of ideas, many of them rather terrible. I only cited him because he wrote an article once called "Flash: 99% Bad". Of course, he is also apparently somewhat of an arrogant jerk by many reports. Also, after he was hired by Macromedia, he wrote an article titled "Flash: 99% Good". So you really can't place too much weight on such a self-serving weasel.

Tufte, on the other hand, I am totally on board with his books and graphic methods for books and charts. However, I'm still a little bit skeptical of any of his web prowess, since I think he still says "computer displays are not dense enough to display information well" so I suspect any of his web-related efforts are somewhat half-hearted -- though I could be wrong on that count.
Also, he was one of the first people to go on a long extended "PowerPoint Sucks" rant, so I respect that!

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Hey, as far as I know there isn't exactly a large army of people joining me on my solo crusade for simpler and cleaner interfaces. Just take a quick look around at the flash-encrusted web of today. Yep, I'm pretty much an "Army of One" (whatever that means).

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Jakob Nielsen's web site.
...
Edward Tufte's web site.

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But here's what really troubles me: If you want to tell Google you don't like the change, how exactly do you do that? I am reminded of Klaatu's ship on The Mall.

Gee, I don't know... how about clicking on "About Google" then "Contact Us"?

Though that's probably a just another way they're being evil: giving people a simple way to voice their opinion.

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Today a "menu bar" appeared on the Google front page.

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wfaulk: merely to match it up with the rest of their services. Unsurprisingly, Gmail, Google Calendar, etc. all have them tucked away up top, out of the way and unobtrusive.

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Rob: The UK site hasn't changed, but I much prefer the new US layout. It looks even cleaner than it did before, and it was already super cleany clean clean.

Yeah, I actually like it, too.
And I think it was a good user interface choice, and will allow them to layer in more services in the future without adding much clutter.

My original "Oh No! A Menubar!" post was intended to be a slightly humorous and self-mocking post poking fun at my paranoia about privacy rights in general and of Google's growing tentacles in particular. And perhaps somewhat mocking my general disdain of Web 2.0 Hype and "style over substance" web design.

As such, my post failed on pretty much every count.
It wasn't very funny.
It wasn't clear I was sort of mocking my foibles.
And some people took it as a personal attack on the kind of web design they like to interact with -- or get paid to do.

No offense was intended.

And I'll try to remember that I sometimes have difficulty conveying a light-hearted tone and humorous spirit when writing for online viewing.

It's just that I live very near the Googleplex. And sometimes at night when I'm sleeping, when my Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie gets knocked slightly askew, I can feel their Brainwaves searching for me, reaching for me, taunting me....

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But here's what really troubles me: If you want to tell Google you don't like the change, how exactly do you do that? I am reminded of Klaatu's ship on The Mall.

Gee, I don't know... how about clicking on "About Google" then "Contact Us"?

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Maybe there was a more direct route...

Yes. Search for "google contact form" on Google and it is the first hit.

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Damn, it wasn't easy...

Click here for a web form

Maybe there was a more direct route, but froom the initial Contact Us I had to do a big loop with no less than 10-20 clicks before I landed on that page.

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Maybe there was a more direct route...

Yes. Search for "google contact form" on Google and it is the first hit.

That's cheating

And it also smacks of a company that is drunkenly in love with its own metaphor. (Ignoring some basic navigation aids for us poor linear thinkers.)

I don't have any conspiratorial notions about the Big G, but any feelings I might have had in the vein of hero worship have dimmed. Free food for Googlistas (grand. 'tho a two-pronged benefit) and they use Linux and do stuff like Summer of Code, but I think the paint faded on "Don't Be Evil" as the brand crossed the Great Wall into China. Just another company. Just another bigger-every-day company. How did certain tech companies treat their customers during the times when they felt they ruled the roost? IBM, Novell, Microsoft?

Time will tell.

I would find a simple "Contact Us" link reassuring.

And I liked the menu just where it was, thank you

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That's cheating

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And it also smacks of a company that is drunkenly in love with its own metaphor. (Ignoring some basic navigation aids for us poor linear thinkers.)

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I think the paint faded on "Don't Be Evil" as the brand crossed the Great Wall into China.

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But you have cheated Webroach of his dope slap.

DAMN STRAIGHT!

Sheesh, here I try to just get like 5 hours of sleep, and someone goes and swipes my Dope Slap®. It's getting so you just can't trust people anymore.

All joking aside, the " " in my original post (the one with "How about...") was intended as a single, overarching " ". But I still say that the mere existence of a feedback form somewhere on the site puts them ahead of quite a few companies who make it impossible to give them a piece of your mind.

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Haha, if you think emailing them is hard, try contacting them by phone sometime.

We had an amnesty deal at work where if you had an attachment out for your arrest for an unpaid parking ticket, you could pay the ticket without having to pay attachment fines. One of the higher ups thought it would be a good idea to list every person's name and address that had an attachment on a series of web pages, sorted by last name, so it would be easier to check and see if YOU had an attachment you didn't know about. It was public record anyway, so they didn't see a problem with it.

3 months went by and the program was concluded. Then we got a call from a lady that was mortified that her contact info was easily searchable in google. Since the pages did not require an logon, and since the genius that put up the page didn't tell the spiders not to cache it, her name was stuck in google's cached pages, along with her home address.

What makes this a big deal is that she was a victim in a spousal abuse case, and was currently hiding from her ex. Now, google has a tool to wipe http sites from their cache, but it's broken when you try to kill an https page. I called for 3 days and could get NOONE but extremely basic tech support, who had no idea how to get a hold of anyone with any power. Thankfully, the cached pages expired without her ex seeing them, or we could have been on the hook for a lawsuit that we should have, and probably would have, lost.

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Now, google has a tool to wipe http sites from their cache, but it's broken when you try to kill an https page. I called for 3 days and could get NOONE but extremely basic tech support

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Genie. Bottle.

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The UK site hasn't changed, but I much prefer the new US layout. It looks even cleaner than it did before, and it was already super cleany clean clean.

Rob

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Could someone please remind me how to get Google to show the non-Canadian USA version for me here?

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Could someone please remind me how to get Google to show the non-Canadian USA version for me here?

Doesn't http://google.com/ work ? From here http://google.co.uk/ takes me to the UK one, http://google.ca/ goes to the Canadian one and http://google.com/ goes to the US one.

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Out of curiosity, if it was a matter of public record then, doesn't it remain a matter of public record?