How Google Went Retro

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

There’s an interesting story from Google’s Matt Cutts about Google going retro. Only it’s not really Google. It’s a Google cool script for Google.

Here is what the Google retro script looks like:

I see one huge problem with this: You have to use Firefox and Greasemonkey. Weird.

Greasemonkey is a Firefox add-on that allows you to customize the way certain web pages look using bits of Javascript. It makes sense then that this tool could be used to customize the way Google’s search engine looks. One of Google’s employees created the script for Greasemonkey that allows anyone to see links to other search engines and allow you to make a search on those other search engines if you don’t find what you are looking for at Google. Interesting.

But here are a few questions I have:

1. If Google is the best search engine then why would anyone think they could get the information they seek elsewhere?
2. If changing Google’s appearance is all that great then why not just create a Firefox add-on that allows all Firefox users the ability to make their searches somewhere else. Same idea, but this opens up the possibility to more Internet searchers.
3. And if you can create a Firefox add-on that does the same thing then why not just create a Google gadget that does it, which would open up the possibility to even more users since anyone on any browser could use the Google gadget?

Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s a great idea. But since most people still are using Internet Explorer, this script cuts out more than half of all Internet searchers. Secondly, since the percentage of Firefox users is pretty small, it cuts out about 75% of Firefox users. So there are only a handful of people online that will be able to use this cool feature, and most of them are Web developers. I’d like to see Google adopt it as a feature of its personalized search feature. Now that would be awesome!