March of the design lemmings

The Internet design business must be full of lemmings.

The latest case-in-point is the way major search and directory sites design paid-placement text ads nowadays.

Visit any Google search results page. On the right side, you'll see what apparently is the seminal format for text ads adjacent to search results: little pastel-green boxes with bold, blue, hyperlinked headings; a dozen or so words of tiny gray text; and the advertiser's URL in forest green Arial type.

Then stumble over to Switchboard, an online Yellow Pages-style directory. Whoops, they did it again! Text ads, placed by context, on the right side of search results with a nearly identical appearance to Google's.

Now go over to Yahoo! Search results pages. Understand that Yahoo! just ditched Google's search index in favor of one built internally. But the portal giant didn't ditch Google's design for the text ads -- same layout, same colors, same positioning.

The folks at Yahoo! should be accustomed to design mimicry. Remember when every content site wanted to be a portal when it grew up? How many sites out there aped Yahoo!'s format for a home page directory outline? How many more outright stole the little graphic that proclaimed a listing was "NEW!" in yellow-outlined block letters?

In fact, take a look at a subcategory index in the Open Directory.

(If you're not familiar with the Open Directory, it is a human-edited directory very similar to Yahoo!'s original directory product. But Yahoo! runs its directory as proprietary and now requires most entities to pay for the privilege of a listing. The Open Directory Project is edited by volunteers, and the directory data is available to Webmasters for free as long as they follow the license terms. Among the licensees: Google, which lists Open Directory results in a tab on its search results pages.)

The Open Directory format is almost identical to Yahoo!'s directory, the way it looked through the '90s and early 2000s. In the last year or two, Yahoo! has tweaked the appearance of its directory indexes, though their structure remains similar.

What gives with all these clones? Maybe designers at the big search sites took to heart something Jakob Nielsen started saying back in 1998: Users show reluctance to accept innovations in Web design.

"C'mon," you say. "That was five-plus years ago. We have to be past that now."

Guess not, cousin. It looks to me as though all eyes are on Google -- that fixture of massive traffic and consumer loyalty, that maker or breaker of bloggers who worship at the altar of its mysterious PageRank algorithms, that IPO candidate generating more buzz than all the Wahl clippers at a Fantastic Sam's -- to set the interface standards for search results pages overall, and paid placements on results pages in particular.

Before we decide whether that's the best outcome, let's ponder why Google's design draws so many bootlickers.

Consumers started using Google because they heard or perceived it worked better than its turn-of-the-millennium competitors to deliver relevant results even if searches were not elegantly structured. Once they tried it and became accustomed to it, wham -- a standard for Web search results was born.

Google claims advertisers get better results there because their ads are matched to the search queries and the context of the results. Search for "pizza," get an ad from a pizza restaurant. Logical.

But I have to believe part of the reason Google's ads work is just that so many people are available to see them. If that's a big enough part of the reason, it would suggest that you can't just pick up Google's search model and expect to get similar results when you scale it to a smaller traffic base.

It would also suggest that, when a markedly better search engine comes along, Google's model will be as fragile as AltaVista, Excite, Lycos and the other searchers that have fallen prey to gradually improving, competitive technologies.

Remember I said Google was perceived to be better than its competitors as it built its loyal user base. That doesn't mean Google was always perceived to be good. It still can't always deliver top notch results -- the Internet is full of badly structured information, and too many novice searchers compound the problem with badly structured search queries. That's a dangerous combination; just ask any librarian.

And at the end of that thread, nothing compels me to believe the design really improves the results or the perceived quality of matches. Google's design is serviceable; it stays out of the way. But other than familiarity, it has few redeeming features.

I can see how a Yahoo!, which had Google-powered search pages until very recently, might want to change out the underlying engine but minimize the user interface design changes to avoid confusing its users.

But I can't see why Switchboard or anyone else would be compelled to pull a Rich Little on Google's ad design (or lack thereof).

And I can't see a lot of good coming from continued consolidation of design thinking around a few overworked interface conventions. OK, it's not as bad as pirating a whole site design. But all I can think of is what Sandra Bullock's character tells Sylvester Stallone's character in the fast-forward-to-the-future movie, Demolition Man:

"Every restaurant is Taco Bell."