If you ask me, Google is one big brand which does not seem to care about looks. It gives a good gift, but not so much with a good gift-wrap! Be it Gmail, the Gtalk desktop-client, Google buzz, iGoogle or the "simple" Google search itself. The best example which has become a victim of Google's boring and "simple" UI is Orkut. Facebook has completely crushed Orkut and Orkut is practically on its way to extinction! But recently, after the revamp of the Google Image Search Engine, it made me happy to note that Google has taken some effort to dress well!
The "new look" of Google Images displays only the image thumbnails (which is what we want) ignoring the links, image size, etc which it used to display before. The hover of the cursor over any image will give us a quick (larger) view of the image. Not only that, in the first search page itself, we can get up to 300 or even more images without having to check them page by page (depending on image size), which wasn't the case before.
On clicking an image, we go to a next page where we get a bigger image, but still not the actual image size itself!!! Why was that needed??!!! There again, from the sidebar, we click a link which FINALLY gives the full and actual image size! Phew! Now when they had to revamp all this, why three clicks?? Couldn't they have stuck with just two?!!
Now if you have heard of or used the GreaseMonkey script "Greased Lightbox" (Joe Lencioni's Greased Lightbox is a user script that enhances browsing on websites that link to images) before... then you will agree with me, that the old Google interface was better since you could view the entire image in the first click after the search itself. Not only that, once a particular image was clicked, you could surf through the other images present on that page, by just pressing the Navigation Keys. So now that Google has changed the Image search format, GreasedLightbox also needs to adapt to that. Hope we get an update soon or rather Google should make the required changes themselves. I'm sure they can show the image details (site, size, etc) within two simple clicks, along with the full-size image!
If you want to check out Greased Lightbox, which can also be used to easily surf through other image sites like Flickr, etc... then you can get it from one of these: http://shiftingpixel.com/lightbox/ or https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/reviews/display/12545
You will need GreaseMonkey addon first to install the script. Do post your comments about this and what do you think of Google's Image Search otherwise? Now if you also note the irony, that though Google's products don't "look good" enough... I'm sure you must have heard that Google's offices are the best looking workplaces in the world. If you want to see them... check it out on Google Image search :P I've just put one pic here.
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