As a midyear Christmas present, I’d like to ask Google for a few things that would make my life a bit easier. Just to clarify, Google, I love you very much and I think you’re superb, but everyone can do better. These are my requests:
- Let me turn off Personalized Search easily. Google, I’m human and humans are lazy. We don’t want to be adding letters to URLs every time we want to search without personalization, and we sure as heck don’t want to sign in and out of Gmail every time we search. I recommend a biggity-big-ass button next to all the “My Notebooks” / “Web History” rubbish that says “TURN OFF PERSONALIZED SEARCH.” I don’t care that 99% of the population won’t know what that means. They don’t know what Advanced Search means and you keep that link around.
- Make Image Search… better. Google Image Search is kind of weird. I search for something; you return pictures of very odd things that I did not search for. Yeah, those are pictures of guys in Speedos, an objectionable road sign and something from Lisa‘s blog. Let me demonstrate another odd result I recently came across: Your third results page for the term “malinois puppy“. Scroll down… Yes, Google – those are pictures of me. I am not a young Belgian shepherd. I’m aware of how my pictures ended up there, but I doubt anyone looking for photos of cuddly puppies actually wanted to see pictures from my SEOmoz profile. Live doesn’t appear to have this problem.
- Although I recognize that on the eighth day, God created Gmail, why is it that you insist on adding everyone I email to my Google Talk window? I email people whom I’d rather didn’t see my stupid status messages, most of which are composed in fluent LOLcat. I feel bad “blocking” them, as I don’t dislike these people. This worries me as much as the idea that people can add my screen name to their AOL instant messengers without me knowing.
- Still on Gmail for a moment, I must say that I find your targeted Adsense intriguing. Every new email comes with the anticipation of what ads you’ll have dreamed up for me this time. Funnily enough, most of them are for SEO services. I find this very amusing.
- Let me search for a keyword and simultaneously exclude all pages that contain some other keyword. For example, if I wanted to search for “rebecca kelley” but exclude all pages that also mention “seomoz”, I’d like to have a command like -term: or -keyword:. Does this currently exist? If so, please let me know about it. (EDIT FROM RAND: just use rebecca kelley -seomoz, you can even do it super cool and use intitle:rebecca intitle:kelley -inurl:seomoz if you want to go super advanced.)
- Let me personalize the links atop the SERPs. I use the Blog Search and Blogger links virtually every day, so can I add them to the regular menu of Images, Video, etc? Thanks in advance.
- Customize the logo more often. Don’t do it so much that we’re all, “Oh. Another customized day. What is it, Thursday?” But do it more than three times a year. It’s adorable.
- I couldn’t care less if you keep or remove Wikipedia entries from the SERPs. Although the WikiP is irritating, it’s sometimes all you need.
What I would like you to remove is the Digg results. Did it ever occur to you that ranking the page that the Digg entry links to would be smarter? The same goes for Netscape pages. Leaving Reddit results there is fine: I cannot fault Reddit without feeling like I’ve done an injustice to the little alien.
- Please add more one-box results, and please add more variations for how we can get them. For instance, if I search for this question one way, I get nothing useful. Not everyone will use the correct wording in order to get the calculator’s answer.
- Is Orkut really necessary? I don’t know how I managed to get signed up with Orkut (I imagine it was for some Web 2.0 Awards-related investigation) but now I get messages like this: “how ru? i am Anthony. i would like to be your friend,so if you like write me. no reply means u do’t have courage to answer. if u accept me as your friend that will real pleasure :-)” That’s a real message; I didn’t make it up. Please accept defeat in the social networking circle.
We only ask for more because we love. Thanks for listening!
