Dark and Disquieting Portents
Have you noticed an increase in the margin on the left side of the Google search results page recently? My coworker started noticing it yesterday, but I thought it was just him. Then I noticed it when I got home, and saw it mentioned on Twitter as well. The weird thing is the platforms where it shows up. My friend first started noticing it with Firefox 3.5 on Windows. I noticed it at home with Firefox 3.0 on Ubuntu, and on this Windows machine I see the effect with Chrome, but not Firefox 3.5 or IE 7:
Margin appearing in Chrome, but not FF 3.5 or IE 7.
It’s interesting to see how my brain has grown so accustomed to the Google search page that even a minor change like this stands out instantly.
I’m sure the answer is something simple that I’m missing, but I haven’t figured it out yet. It doesn’t seem dependant on whether I’m logged into Google or not, and is also independent of whether I search through the browser search bar or from google.com directly. I was going to browse the source and CSS to see where it’s coming from, but after glancing at this:
Hurk.
I quickly lost interest.
2 comments to Dark and Disquieting Portents
I think they made the source deliberately hard to read so people couldn’t just swipe g’s results and call it their own on their “fancy” search engine. I experienced something similar when I started to write a script that would notify me when google’s front page changed. Their front page’s source is surprisingly non-simple! So that project is still not done…
@Caleb: It’s an official layout change that they are rolling out slowly I guess. http://mashable.com/2009/07/03/googles-new-layout/
@Emily: I doubt the source is obfuscated because google is afraid of people stealing their, because they already provide an api by which you can use their results in your own apps.
However it might be obfuscated to discourage people from page scraping, and instead use the proper web API.
2 July 2009 at 09:09