A couple of things that have annoyed me lately about Google’s various web apps:
Street View. Google has recently unveiled their Street View functionality in Google Maps. Basically it allows you to see 360° panorama images of streets in specific U.S. cities. It’s a really nifty feature, but there’s a problem. Try clicking on this link. If you’re in the States, everything is fine. If you’re outside the States, you’ll probably be incredibly confused. That’s because Google, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that people outside the States shouldn’t see the Street View data, and have turned it off by default. You have to use a simple workaround to see the purty pictures. This isn’t a huge deal, but it’s a bit of a pain when everyone’s posting “omg look at this streetview I found!” links and you’re sitting there wondering why nothing’s showing up.
Custom Search Engine, take one. Google’s Custom Search Engine feature has been up for a couple of months now. It’s basically a way for people to construct their own personalized search engine by limiting the sites to search to a certain group of sites—handy for searching specific topics like, say, cascading style sheets (CSS) on specific expert sites. It’s also handy for site-specific search, like when you want to put a search function on your own site. However, it turns out that CSE reacts badly to Firefox’s Adblock extensions, or more specifically the blacklist rulesets Adblock uses. Because Google uses a Javascript-created iframe to show search results inside the design of your site, it triggers an aggressive iframe-blocking rule in Adblock—the rule blocks any iframe whose URL contains the term “ad,” and Google’s CSE results URL contains a query string including “ad=w#”. As a result, any browser with Adblock enabled will see the site design and a blank space where the results are supposed to be. Highly counterintuitive.
Custom Search Engine, take two. But that’s not the serious flaw with CSE; the serious flaw is that if a user has Javascript disabled, the search results also disappear. Worse, there’s absolutely no hint whatsoever that you need Javascript turned on; all you get is the site design and the blank spot, just like with Adblock. Now Adblock mucks about a bit with website operation because it blocks items that aren’t supposed to be blocked. But disabling Javascript is a far more common occurrence; moreover, it’s perfectly standard behaviour. I’m not one of those zealots that says your site must work absolutely perfectly if Javascript is off, but to leave the site a) non-functional without b) giving any clue as to why is preposterous.
Obfuscated search results. Finally, a little annoyance about Google’s search results themselves: recently Google has taken to including an extremely lengthy redirect link to sites in the search results, as opposed to the actual URL of the site. This is a giant pain in the ass when attempting to copy and paste links from Google’s search results, and I don’t really understand why the change was made.
