IP Democracy: Google Needs to Remember the KISS Principle

I was swamped yesterday afternoon and didn’t get a chance to dig into or monitor the string of announcements or blog postings flowing from Google’s Press Day. Maybe that’s why reading Google’s news cold and checking out some of the new features unveiled during the event are taxing my mental abilities.

Or maybe it’s because some of the enhancements, (which, to Google’s credit center on the company’s core strength, search) are, um, really complex. Maybe too complex for the average user.

Take this one, called Google Co-Op. Here’s the description:

Google Co-op is about sharing expertise. You can contribute your expertise and benefit when others do the same. Help other users find information more easily by creating “subscribed links” for your services and labeling webpages around the topics you know best.

As best I can figure, this is about “tagging” Google searches so that a user’s favorite sources, or “subscribed links,” show up first in the results pages. Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch has as good a description of this new tool as anybody and even he is slightly confused.For one thing, it doesn’t seem to be working well yet. For another, only someone with an M.S. in computer science can make it work, or so it seems.

Here’s the guide that allows anyone to get started. I had to laugh at the intro:
The API was designed to be as easy to use as possible, and requires only basic XML skills. This guide will show you how to create subscribed links, with plenty of examples along the way.
I laughed because in short order, I was lost! Barry Schwartz, who is a programmer, still felt lost himself and said he’d through it at “one of his XML guys” tomorrow. In contrast, making a Google Toolbar Button is a heck of a lot easier. I sure wish making subscribed links were, because they are potentially going to be an important new way for people to ensure they are getting traffic from Google.

On the simpler side, Google did announce something that’s kind of cool and seemingly easy to use: Google Trends. Google Trends allows users to compute how many searches have been done for certain terms relative to a total. It even has a news volume graph (not including blogs!) that allows a user to find out how many times a certain term has appeared in news articles. As Steve Rubel points out, it’s a must for PR folks.

Beyond that, however, the Google enhancements, while leveraging the company’s great expertise in search, are not simple. And Google has made a fortune off its very plain and simple search functionality. Although I’m sure that Google’s new features will take off in time, I wish the company had remembered the KISS principle: Keep It Simple Stupid.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on May 11, 2006 8:03 AM to IP Democracy