Rant About Google

I usually like Google's new features, but this latest design change is an exception. Google says it wants its new features to feel like they were there all along. They believe this will make the feature more comfortable to use, but in fact the opposite is true. It generates this eerie feeling of something being not right. Humans are optimized to adapt to change while preserving a sense of history. When things just appear and pretend they were always there, it's unnerving. But more importantly, the new "search options" feature is just plain bad. It's unhelpful because it makes you push more buttons to do what you want to do, whereas before it was better at predicting which option you might want. And that Wonder Wheel: It's a wonder Google would release anything so absurd and useless.