Official Google Blog: What comes next in this series? 13, 33, 53, 61, 37, 28…

Late one night in the summer of 2000, I found myself answering user support emails in response to two new features we had just released, Advanced Search and Preferences (at the time catchily called “Language, Display, and Filtering Options” :)). Busy crafting answers about how to set Safesearch or change the number of results offered by default, I worked my way through the email queue. And then I saw it: The next email had just a number (“37”) in the subject - and no message text. What a weird form of spam, I thought. Why would anyone be motivated to just send a number? I searched for the user’s email address to see what else had been sent. Interesting. Lots of numbers: 33, 53, and then a clue: “61, getting a bit heavy, aren’t we?” Furthermore, the date on each of the messages seemed very familiar. Then I realized that’s because the dates were all days that I had launched various changes on the homepage. “Getting a bit heavy?” - that one did correspond to one of the wordiest homepage releases we had ever done. Could the sender be counting words? Sure enough, I looked back, counted the words myself, and he was - a manual, human version of a scale for the Google homepage. He was weighing our homepage and letting us know when it was getting too heavy. One of his earliest mails had a note in the body: “What happened to the days of 13?” - referring to the word count on the initial 1999 homepage.

I think about this 2008 blog post from Marissa Mayer occasionally for a few reasons:

1. The company’s leadership (including the cofounders!) truly cared about the user experience. They wanted to maintain a minimalist aesthetic which was the opposite approach from competitors.
2. A user took the time to both track minute changes and report them to an employee.

Now compare 2008 Google to what I observed moments ago on google.com.

1. An “AI Mode” button embedded in the search input.
2. A “Create images” button with two rows of text and an emoji.
3. A “Do more with AI Mode” button with two rows of text and an icon.
4. An aggressive onboarding/harbor tour overlay stealing my attention and covering another button.

Tracking word count is long gone. Now we need to track interface complexity and distraction. I assume there is a pressing need to inform users that google.com is capable of complex tasks incorporating files and images, but this ain’t it.

Also, what’s a “tab” in this context? I had to think for a bit but I figured it out: if you have multiple tabs open in Chrome, you can refer to them in a Google search. I would love to learn more about the thinking behind this feature. I assume the team believes a user will have many tabs open and ponder: “I want to research using my open tabs so let me create another tab, navigate to google.com, click the plus button, select my tabs one at a time, and then prompt.” This feels like a lot to ask from a user.