what do you think Google search will look like in the future?

We all know that the Google search feature is pretty complex but I think to "look" of the site should change dramatically.

Why not show mini screen shots of search results

Have colored graphic and integrate sponsors to make it "look" more like a AOL home page

Your ideas are welcome (the current look is antiquated...I can't imagine they can stay with the status quo)

Ideas?

 

I don't think it will change much at all.

 

Why do you think that the current look is antiquated? I don't see any benefit in showing a miniscreen shot of the results.

A google search returns a list of relevant websites together with a short description of the page. It's simple and quick. I like simple things and it would seem that the vast majority of internet users do too.

 

I don't think the actual appearence will change massively but I think that the results themselves will become more personalised to individual user preferences and certainly more region based - we are already beggining to see these changes being slowly introduced.

 

In short, doing that would mean quadrupling bandwidth usage and increasing the most expensive part of serving a SERP by roughly 1000%. Not to mention the need for a new network of crawlers dedicated to keeping up with providing at least semi-current screenshots on rapidly changing websites.

The average Google SERP is probably about 32KB, the average thumbnail image which is large enough to be of any value is probably going to measure in around 10 KB. In an almost worse case scenario, the thumbnail image on my profile here at DP is 24KB.

Assuming an average size of 10KB for a 10-11 result SERP, that would be an extra 100KB per SERP, which is 3X the the size of the SERP itself and comes out to quadrupling the bandwidth used by every SERP.

What's worse than that however, is that it would mean servers would need to account for 10-11 more HTTP connections being made for every SERP to serve the images, which works out to a 1000% increase in connection overhead.

 

Agreed.

KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid!) comes to mind.