Google Design

After reading The Shallows, Carr’s chapter “The Church of Google” really got me thinking. What is Google trying to achieve? Carr writes that the company’s main mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” (182). I think most can agree that Google has succeeded in its mission even though Schmidt, the CEO of Google claims this will take at least 300 years. It is an obvious fact that Google is the top visited search engine, and has reached its goal in organizing bountiful amounts of information that is useful in everyday life, and any person with access to the Internet can access it. What else does the website want to achieve? The more immediate goal is to “create the perfect search engine that understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want” (152). I cannot imagine what else the Google Corporation could possibly do to make the search engine any more precise, fast, or useful…but then again, Google is always coming up with new features that don’t fail to  shock me…

I use Google every day, more than several times a day. Whenever I log on to a new computer or phone, I always set Google as the main default for my Internet. I also just realized while typing this that of the three ways to access the Internet, through Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome, I always pick Google chrome. For some reason, I just find it the simplest, least cluttered without all the toolebars and add-ons, and the fastest. When we were reading this chapter and discussed it in class, we talked about how Google tested forty-one shades of blue that had the most visitors for the website. Two things crossed my mind…Who has enough time to actually test that many colors and who actually can tell the difference between forty-one shades of blue? Apparently whatever the corporation is doing is working because billions of searches are done every day. About a month ago I noticed my home page of Google began changing with background pictures.  Sitting bored at work, I realized you can scroll through pictures that seem never ending and pick one of your own choice. I now have a cool picture of a pug that welcomes me to my homepage every time I go to use the internet. Carr also writes about the specialized services Google offers, such as “images, videos, news stories, maps, blogs, and academic journals” (159). I guess until after reading this I did not realize how much I rely on Google. Since it is my homepage, clicking on the maps button is faster than typing in the website Mapquest in my browser. Clicking on the videos link is right there instead of having to type in Youtube. The designers of the Google website believe the “design has become much more of a science than an art” (181). The makers actually measure differences on the site and mathematically learn which one is right (181). I think it is bizarre how much time they take into researching into so much depth to see what the users may like better, but I guess it is working. 

Kaleigh Sullivan