Wider Google
Asides
Whoa, Google widened the search box. I don’t know why, but I’m in shock. I remember thinking when the links above the search box got wider than the box itself that they’d jumped the shark, but obviously they got their “mojo” back. 
It seems that this change hasn’t been fully rolled out yet as I’m still not observing any differences between the current google.com hope page and the older archived home pages. The search bar still appears shorter than the links.
Are you sure they widened it? It’s been a while since I visited Google (I always use the search bar for Googling), but it doesn’t seem much larger than the last time I saw it…
If they did, however, widen it, then as the usability masochist I am, I can tell you why:
§ A wide search box encourages users to write more keywords (JN et. al.)
Or is it simply that they removed the “new!” text next to “Local”?
Check http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://google.com
Oh it’s so ugly!
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Interesting – on the main Google.com page, it matches the width of the links… whereas on Google.ca the search bar is now wider than the links are.
Hmm, I looked at archive.org from January 3, 2004 and the search bar is identical in dimension to the current page. I took a screenshot of the evidence that you can see if you click on my name
Hmmm, it may have been because I was looking at it on a different computer? When I looked at it on my Powerbook earlier it was definitely much wider. Maybe a false alarm.
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Google.ca doesn’t have a Froogle link, so fewer links = optical illusion of a wider search bar.
I don’t notice anything, maybe because I can’t go to google.com (always redirects me to google.ca)
Google usually test their changes by rolling them out to increasing numbers of randomly-selected users, starting with a small percentage like 5%. That way if there’s catastrophic bug, it won’t affect all of their gargantuan user base.
By the way, does anyone know what’s http://www.google.com/ie is all about? Some mobile edition (like for PDAs etc) of Google?
I think that’s for the IE sidebar.
Ah, I see, just seen it in my refer log so I was kinda curious
It was designed for the IE sidebar, but a lot of handhelds use it for their Google link.
wonder when they’ll put “directory” back above the search box, and at the top of all the results pages.
it was really handy for searching dmoz after a google came up with nothing interesting.
i’ve been using http://www.google.com/intl/xx-elmer/ since they removed the links to dmoz searches, as an alternative.. wowks gweat!
Google always thinks W-I-D-E-R !!