[bear with me on this one... my tongue is slightly in my cheek]
my friend James thinks this is weird:
Well, it is, and it isn't. When I looked down that list of features that google has;
stockquotes, addressbooks, calculators, maps, translation, yadda, yadda,
I suddenly thought, fuck, this is like yahoo, except that instead of inducing link-blindness with endless feature clutter, Google has just taken the universal search box idea to an extreme. Google now is (or is well on the way to being) a goddam portal.
and then you think about a bit more, and you realise what that search box really is:
Google is a bad unix shell. A one line, no history, no file completion, no filesystem, /bin/googlesh, shell*, into an OS with a limited set of moderately useful utility commands. More like the interface you'd get on an embedded device like a coke machine, but a shell nevertheless.
and then you run into problems, because what google is now losing ( and the bane of all command line interfaces) is any kind of discoverability for all these new functions. I'll never remember half those features, because there are few visual cues to tell me they're there, and I can't be arsed to remember anything. If I could remember stuff, I wouldn't need sites like google.
So the most apparently usable site on earth is turning, before our very eyes, into the kind of obfuscated user-alienating unfeature-rich environment we've been running from all these years.
The geeks just wouldn't let us get away that easy, would they?
* one for Matt Webb , I reckon.
## 2 Comments ยป
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### Tom Said,
August 23, 2003 @ 12:05 pm
So presumably what you want to do is:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=man+google
T
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### James Redin Said,
July 4, 2005 @ 9:28 pm
You may also be interested in this keyboard interface I wrote in JavaScript for the Google Calculator:
http://www.xnumber.com/google_calc.htm
Try:
2M6T52 + 3T6
by using the [H] [T] [M] keys.
Any feedback or suggestions will be appreciated.
Thanks!