Wow, do I hate the new Google Image Search.

10 years ago
They've screwed this pooch so completely that I'm starting to wonder whether other search engines still actually exist. Turns out those are hard to Google for.
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37 Responses:

  1. mister_borogove says:
    10 years ago at 11:01 am

    I know, right? It's like they want me to use Bing.
  2. sivart13 says:
    10 years ago at 11:08 am

    Any specifics? It's been working okay for me.
    • jwz says:
      10 years ago at 11:13 am

      Find the image I care about. Click. Wait. Wait. Wait. Oh, a trendy pseudo-pop-up-window over a grayed-out web page. Right click to do "Save Image As". No, they seem to have intentionally disqabled that. Click. Click again. How the fuck do I dismiss this popup? Oh, I guess I actually have to use the fake-Windows close box. Click. What's it doing? Click. Why the fuck do I have a hypnowheel spinner now? Click. Oh, there it goes. Oh, now it's reloading the whole page. Where's the image I was just looking at? Oh great, now I'm expected to scroll twelve pages down through the document to find it visually. Thanks a whole fucking lot.

      It's actually hard to imagine how they could have made this worse.
      • leolo says:
        10 years ago at 11:21 am

        They could have done it in flash! And then crash the browser somehow!
        • pikuorguk says:
          10 years ago at 1:46 pm

          Oh but it does crash the browser, especially on slow links. I guess browsers can't handle being told to background load 500 images in a rapidly expanding scrolling mess.

          I like to hit the link at the bottom to make the old version come back. If we all do that, maybe they'll take a hint.
      • edge_walker says:
        10 years ago at 11:24 am

        You want the tiny "Full-size image" link from the right-hand bar of the screen with the overlay.

        There is in fact no change of functionality at all - you can find all the same information and do all the same things in the same places. But I only realised that - with surprise - when I enumerated them. They managed to make it confusing with identical functionality. Total usability fail.
      • sivart13 says:
        10 years ago at 11:25 am

        'Save Image As' seems to work fine for me in Firefox 3.6 / Chrome on Ubuntu. Maybe there's some anti-saving Javascript on the page from your search result, and the Google overlay happens to be respecting it?

        I actually like the new search better, CPU and bandwidth hog that it is. The overlay thing feels better to me than the "this is an image search result" top frame from the old version, which would follow you around forever if you navigated in the lower frame, only to awkwardly bring you back to the original result if you ever hit 'Remove Frame'.

        Refreshing the whole page after clicking the 'x' does seem overkill, though.
        • edge_walker says:
          10 years ago at 11:35 am

          The refresh is inevitable for fixing the URL in the browser address bar.

          And it is exactly the same action in all its consequences as clicking "Remove frame" used to be.

          That's the surprising thing - as I said -: if you actually look at it, you will find the new GIS is identical to the old GIS in every aspect except the confusion.
          • ungratefulninja says:
            10 years ago at 11:40 am

            The refresh is inevitable for fixing the URL in the browser address bar.

            Terrifyingly, this is no longer true. Flickr (ab)uses this to avoid a reload when switching between different sets on the same image: see for example this image and click between the various sets it's in.
        • edge_walker says:
          10 years ago at 11:42 am

          Wait, yes, there is one difference - and one that would be construed as a good one IMO: you cannot navigate in the content of the original page while the overlay is up, where previously you could navigate in the bottom frame, as you pointed out. So they improved it while making it worse!
        • holywar says:
          10 years ago at 12:03 pm

          Refreshing the whole page after clicking the 'x' does seem overkill, though.

          I agree with jwz, the new search is an utter PITA, with one exception: Somehow it's either not actually loading the full page, or Google is proxying it initially. I haven't done any research to figure out what's going on behind the scenes, but what I do know is that using the permit-cookie addon to filter cookies doesn't prompt me for cookies when I look at the image, but does when I close the preview and go to the page for real. So it's slightly more private, at least.
      • hepkitten says:
        10 years ago at 11:27 am

        right click -> save image as still works for me on goog image search. are you sure it wasn't just the override of that particular websites html preventing you from saving that image?

        searching on 'image search engine' is going to yield you a lot of stock photo websites which is probably not what you are looking for. i know picsearch is supposed to be good (http://www.picsearch.com/) but i always find their interface clunky, even though it mimics old google image search, so you might prefer it.
      • nelc says:
        10 years ago at 12:01 pm

        Right-click on the image is working okay for me. As for the rest of it, I could forgo having to load the page twice - if I want the page for some reason - but otherwise it works as before, and I'm already used to it.
      • topazirradiated says:
        10 years ago at 2:44 pm

        I absolutely agree in every particular. I hate it with a vengeance. noscript will make it so you see the old style search, I believe, but noscript itself is a PITA to deal with. Maybe you could use it just for google images.
      • mcity says:
        10 years ago at 5:06 pm

        Strangely, google.co.uk has the old-school GIS, with actual pages and links and frames. Which is weird, cause it was on the new format earlier this week. Google.com still has the fancy new stuff.
        • abates says:
          10 years ago at 9:26 pm

          Google search in general seems to change for me at random. Like I'll search and get domain results all indented, and then an hour later I'll search again, and they'll be organised differently.
    • mister_borogove says:
      10 years ago at 11:53 am

      The mouseover pop-up is massive fail for me.

      I'm scrolling slowly through the images (with two finger scroll on the touchpad) to find the one I want. I don't want to obscure the image I'm looking at with the mouse pointer, so the mouse pointer is over an image that isn't the image I'm looking at. Therefore, an image that is not the one I'm interested in is the one that suddenly explodes in my face and obscures what I actually care about. It's unbelievably unhelpful.

      Does anyone like mouseover popup previews?
      • lafinjack says:
        10 years ago at 8:34 pm

        Also, when you click into the search field and move the cursor away (like, down over the search results) the popup preview will steal focus from the search field.
      • grlfridae says:
        10 years ago at 6:00 am

        I HATE that. I have to strategically get the pointer over far enough right to avoid all images, or I'm a huffing, sighing, angry person every time.
        • util says:
          10 years ago at 9:11 am

          For me, scrolling with two fingers doesn't trigger the pop-up... I have to move the cursor slightly after scrolling for that. Is it popping up for you after just scrolling or scrolling + cursor move? Out of curiosity, which browser and OS are you using? Thanks.
  3. daruku says:
    10 years ago at 11:45 am

    http://www.altavista.com/
    http://webcrawler.com/

    and the new
    http://www.ask.com/
  4. rivetpepsquad says:
    10 years ago at 12:04 pm

    Yup. And WHY, WHY? It worked so well before! [grumble]
  5. fantasygoat says:
    10 years ago at 1:06 pm

    As a incurable image thief, I agree that the new layout is fucking terrible and stupid. Very un-Googly.

    However, they offer a solution.

    At the bottom, click "Switch to basic version":

    Then at the right side when the image pops up:

    I believe it saves your preferences if you log in. They should just switch back to the basic one, though.
  6. strspn says:
    10 years ago at 1:33 pm

    I really wish they'd cooperate with the CustomizeGoogle OptimizeGoogle team. Who knows what's too much to ask for these days?
  7. osmium_ocelot says:
    10 years ago at 3:29 pm

    I don't know what browser or OS you're running, or if it even should make a difference; but I'm running Firefox 3.5.2 with NoScript; google does NOT have permission to run Javascript. I haven't seen their image search page change at all. So I'm guessing if you disable Javascript it'll work like it used to.

    ...

    Wow. Yeah, I think you want to disable javascript and that'll do it. I just turned it on to see what the image search looks like and wow, yeah nothankyou donotwant.

    ...

    Also, annoying to turn on javascript to make this comment.
    • allartburns says:
      10 years ago at 4:02 pm

      I've had some pretty good results on Bing lately, especially for wonky things like scheduling flights with strange requirements or finding technical docs for old bikes.
      • rapier1 says:
        10 years ago at 2:31 pm

        Traitor.

        Serious, I've been getting less spammy results with bing lately especially when search for information on computer components. It's unnerving.
  8. rane500 says:
    10 years ago at 5:08 pm

    Those pop-ups drive me insane, I want to find the person or persons who decided to make them popular and hurt them very badly. It's right up there with social network integration - and that's rapidly moving to be on par with e-mail in your law of software envelopment. I almost screamed with rage when my company decided to use Salesforce's new pseudo-Twitter feature "Chatter."
    • holywar says:
      10 years ago at 7:13 pm

      I almost screamed with rage when my company decided to use Salesforce's new pseudo-Twitter feature "Chatter."

      Fuck Salesforce, even without that "Chatter" bullshit. SF is continually changing their interface, and they somehow manage to make it worse with every iteration. I'd managed to avoid any meaningful contact with it for a couple of months, and after having to use it this week to unsuccessfully try and find information that I knew for a fact was there (and had found with previous versions of the interface), I fail to see any utility in it whatsoever.
  9. andr00 says:
    10 years ago at 8:52 pm

    They've screwed this pooch so completely that I'm starting to wonder whether other search engines still actually exist. Turns out those are hard to Google for.

    That's a poem, right there.
  10. spendocrat says:
    10 years ago at 1:03 am

    And that thing I used to do where I'd control-click a bunch of pages so they'd load in the background is gone. Now I have to scroll down and wait for the damned thumbnails to load. No matter how fast my connection is, nothing is as fast as "already loaded."
  11. frogfarm says:
    10 years ago at 2:48 pm

    Also, it appears one can no longer search "Google Groups" (i.e., Usenet archives) without being signed into a Google account.