Is it just me that hates the idea of this covering the google adverts? I don't think that's a good idea personally. I installed it, and then when it was covering google ads, I just thought "eugh no that's just wrong". It'd be far better to have it in a separate sidebar. Leave the browser window as it is.
If you're adblock, then sure - be like that. But if you're trying to be a legitimate company, covering someone elses adverts with your own content seems like a bad strategy.
We intentionally picked the right hand side of the page where the ads are since we think that is the part of the page that can be most improved. There are several companies experimenting with improving the Google results page: Surfcanyon, Foxmarks and Infoaxe spring to mind, the latter two also affecting the right side of the page.
Do you object to us pushing down the ads because you find them useful? Or you think it is wrong for us to potentially interfere with Google's revenue stream? Or another reason...?
In many cases, the ads are what I want. When I think about it, I often phrase my search term in a way that will bring up the ads I want. It's sort of semi-conscious.
I am probably a bad example though because I advertise on Google so I have a pretty good intuitive grasp of what I'll find there.
To me, replacing the ads is like replacing images, or news or any of the other things that I use.
What I might use is a Google that has Bing (or others) as one of its tabs (near images, news, etc.).
Both - I find them useful, and I think it's the "wrong" thing to do morally. I'd much rather it was in a separate sidebar, leaving the google page as it was intended.
WebMynd is definitely targeted at the people who don't find the ads on the right particularly useful.
We think it is right that users should be able to opt-in to have more control over how their online tools appear and function. Provided there is attribution i.e. we're not taking a tool or content and claiming we created it.
Sure, bear in mind though "people who don't find ads useful" is a very small niche market. Also by definition, they're not the type of people you can monetize.
Interestingly, I can really, really tell that Google has iterated pixel-by-pixel on their interface to get the optimum look because there's an "uncanny valley" I sense when I see results UI that is close but-not-quite-like theirs.
It's really hard to get the search results to look exactly like Google (the script doesn't quite do it) and when it's not quite right it feels as if it is a fake/squatter/parked page rather than the nice clean Google search results. This script attempts to get partially there, but Bing, by default, reminds me a lot of the sort of "parked" search results you see out there.
I haven't quite put my finger on exactly what triggers that feeling, but it seems to be a mixture of line-height, coloring, font size, and the length of the excerpt.
Great analysis. I can't put my finger on it either, but there is something about the colors and spacing that makes me implicitly look away / be unable to read the bing results. I've been conditioned to ignore any text that has a certain format.
Neat. I've always kept using Google, while having a sneaking suspicion that in some areas the other search engines had surpassed them. However Google was good enough, and the only way to really tell is to do large amounts of side by side comparisons, and who has the time for that?
To get to Bing you have to use the "MSN" link, but you can get a side to side comparison of any two search engines. Plus, you don't have to install anything, since it just uses frames. (Most people implementing this today would use javascript, because as we all know frames are evil, and hence, we have to use other tools to re-implement frames.)
You don't have to install anything, but you do have to keep remembering to go to a different site, outside your usual workflow, if you want to see the results side-by-side.
Thanks. A lot of the work we've done is building a platform which makes it really easy to add new sources, and improve search in general. So we like to show that off when appropriate :-)
If you already have WebMynd installed at the latest level (0.8.1), restart your browser, do a search on Google then activate the Bing results by looking in the 'Knowledge' section in the Sites menu.
If you're adblock, then sure - be like that. But if you're trying to be a legitimate company, covering someone elses adverts with your own content seems like a bad strategy.