Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Transparent weather?

Yet more features from those clever people at Google, they've just added a weather: operator to their search box. However it's interesting that in preference to introducing a new "Google Weather" service, they've instead overloaded the search box functionality in a similar manner as they did when they introduced the movie: operator.

While integrating these features into their search page means a less cluttered interface for them, the downside to this strategy is that, to use the feature, you need to know it's there. Most people don't really know how to use a search engine, especially all the functionality hidden inside Google. I astonished someone the other day, who really should have known better, by using the Google calculator to do some unit conversion. The calculator has been around for a long time, and most casual users don't know about it. That's not an encouraging sign...

1 comment:

  1. I agree, it's not a healthy sign to have all the great features used by so few.

    Google should probably do something like "Cool stuffs you can use google for besides searching". Or at least, when I search for a unit converter, they should suggest me to use their calculator in the result page.

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