I just read this piece on bad design. It’s an interesting read, but I think it lacks some historical context. Andy faults Google’s design as “unremarkable and poorly laid out.” I agree that it contains a lot of design afterthoughts, but I attribute that to their incredible growth over the last few years.

Let’s take a quick stroll down memory lane.

• Lycos, circa 1996. For myself and many others, this was the primary search engine in this era.
• Lycos circa ‘97-’98. Getting more bloated. Even worse as we move forward into the portal craze: 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002. So bloated it’s unusable for actual searching.
• Some time in there, I switched to AltaVista. Once again, it started out fairly light, then morphed into a bloated portal from ‘99 through ‘02.
• Again, I made a switch, along with most of my peer group. This time, to HotBot. I can’t show you how it looked back then, but it was fairly minimal, and it’s results were good. It also morphed into a behemoth portal, though it’s much more minimal these days.

Now, compare those with Google, circa 1999, or 2000, which was when I recall it gaining serious traction. There’s just no comparison. It’s minimal design was remarkable. Many people switched to Google just to escape the portal bloat that had made the other search engines less useful. It was so successful that everyone else copied them.

While it’s certainly true now that their design isn’t very well thought out, I can’t agree with the cavalier dismissal of their design as “unremarkable.”

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