back to article Ageing Google supersizes its search box

Google is finally growing up, and its eyesight is clearly going accordingly. The search giant's in-house poster girl Marissa Mayer told the world yesterday that the Silicon Valley powerhouse's latest innovation was to make its search box "bigger". Slightly bigger deal you might say, but as Vice President, Search Products & …

COMMENTS

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  1. umacf24

    Missed the boat?

    It's been a long time since I googled through anything other than the search box on a browser....

  2. Ian Bradshaw
    FAIL

    oh dear ...

    "Although this is a very simple idea and an even simpler change, we're excited about it"

    there excited about that ... surely the best advert never to work for google, ever.

    Some script kiddies from uni with new and refreshing ideas are really gonna be flocking there if thats suppost to float their boat ...

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Err...

    Isn't this sort of thing less of an innovation, more a legal requirement under the Disabillity Discrimination Act?

  4. Snot Nice
    Paris Hilton

    More fun to use!?

    Me thinks young Marissa needs to subscribe to Cosmo.

    Hmmm any danger I can watch? ;)

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Dammit!

    You corrected the typo before I could get a comment in!

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    poster girl...

    OK, admit it guys... Who else here googled her name and pressed the "I'm feeling lucky" button?

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    He's kidding

    "homepage even easier and more fun to use."

    Cripes, he really must have a low pleasure threshold.

    Next week kids, peeling potatoes, now more fun as there are twice as many to do!

  8. Lionel Baden
    Joke

    why couldnt they

    just put a small link at the bottom for people with sight difficulties ????

  9. ulala
    Unhappy

    Ctrl + -

    Used it this morning and though I had accidently change the zoom in my browser and immediately pressed Ctrl + - a couple of times which made all the other text really small.

    Where is the classic classic setting so I can have every thing the same size again.

  10. alistair millington
    Thumb Up

    Eh?

    "Although this is a very simple idea and an even simpler change, we're excited about it — because it symbolises our focus on search and because it makes our clean, minimalist homepage even easier and more fun to use."

    What the hell is "Fun" about using Google?

  11. ed2020
    Stop

    Title

    "keep track of your friends demise" - is lacking an apostrophe.

  12. Ray0x6

    not news

    go back to sleezzzzzzzzz

  13. Ben Tasker
    Stop

    Ahhhhhhhh

    So thats what it was! I went on Google earlier and assumed that I had left Firefox zoomed in, so I pressed Ctrl - to zoom back out. Didn't look quite right though, now I know why!

    Can't say I like it, I'll save large text for when I'm older!

  14. Jock in a Frock
    Thumb Up

    Hasn't happened on .co.uk yet

    Just on google.com

  15. sandman
    Thumb Down

    Phew

    That's a relief - I thought my screen resolution had changed itself. Looks a bit kindergarten to me.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    No no no no no

    If I want things to look bigger, I'll click that little button in the corner of my browser that looks like a magnifying glass.

    If I want things to look RIGHT, I'll leave it saying 100%

    And now google have gone and cocked it all up by making the centerpiece of my homepage look disproportionate and crap.

    Treble, mid-range and Bass turds.

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    more fun?

    Has google's home page ever been fun? They need a better dictionary in their marketing dept...

  18. Benny
    Thumb Up

    Phew

    I thought I was going crazy, I kept trying to zoom out to normal but it wasnt changing anything...

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Megaphone

    Marissa Meyer you say

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcSujceZDmg

  20. NibblesTheHamster
    Happy

    Funny That

    But I can make the search bar and fonts bigger AND smaller in Firefox by using CTRL and the Scrollwheel. Perhaps they may be interested in paying me to point this out before they announce their new inovations

  21. Alexis Vallance

    Grrrr

    Looks crap. Thought there was something wrong with my browser at first.

  22. David Horn

    Oops

    I spent 20 minutes fiddling around with my browser settings this morning trying to get the zoom control back to normal.

  23. bish
    Thumb Down

    Ugh.

    Welcome to Fisher Price™'s My First Search Engine©!

    It looks so retarded, I may even start using bing. Glad I wasn't the only one fiddling with zoom.

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    More fun to use & exciting

    would be if they just put a piccie of a sultry Ms Mayer on there!

  25. LaeMi Qian

    I do believe...

    ...it is a tad bigger. Honestly hadn't noticed.

  26. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    That's be irritating me all morning

    Glad to know it's "official".

    The buttons are bigger too.

    Looks like something Tomy might make.

    This wouldn't have anything to do with them patenting their "unique look and feel", would it?

  27. Snowy Silver badge

    No change for the UK

    N change at .co.uk

  28. 3G

    Breaking news

    Google changes the size of a box by 2mm

  29. Steven Knox
    WTF?

    Mine hasn't changed...

    Oh wait, that's because it's part of my browser UI.

    Given that every browser worth talking about has copied this particular feature from Opera by now, who even bothers with google's homepage now?

  30. Richard 102

    Um ...

    "we're excited about it."

    Jeebus, and I thought *my* life was boring.

    You know, I'm feeling better about me. Thanks, google!

  31. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Someone...

    ...gets PAID for this? Seriously, how long of a brainstorming session did it take to come up with this?

  32. Bernie 2

    It's amazing how many people will complain about literally anything

    "How dare they change it, I thought I had left the page zoomed in but it turned out I hadn't, now I don't have to zoom in to the page any more because they have done it for me, naturally this makes me very angry. I spent 2 seconds of my life that I will never get back thinking my monitor was faulty, if this is a practical joke I don't think it's funny"

    etc

  33. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    !. Open front door. 2. Step outside.

    Is this really earth shattering? I only wandered into this story as I am bored waiting for a work batch process to finish before getting off home. I cannot believe that a company makes a single HTML element slightly bigger and people are discussing it in forums! I am married with kids, I have no life, but it seems a damn sight more interesting than some people's!

    ( I am aware of the irony of decrying it via the same forums, so don't bother pointing it out! )

  34. Anonymous Coward
    Megaphone

    What?

    So they tweaked the design ever so slightly and that means someone has to spout this revolting verbal diarrhoea?

    It's almost Microsoftian --- but at least she didn't mention "improving the user experience".

    Where's the steaming pile of shit icon?

  35. Chris C

    Get better coders

    I don't use Google's home page, so I had no idea. To be honest, I haven't used their home page is a long time, so I don't notice a difference. However, Google really does need to get better coders. I would suggest someone who can actually finish a job without losing interest or falling asleep, and someone who actually knows HTML. I say this because Google's home page is not valid HTML. It ends with a closing script tag. There is no closing body or closing html tag. At first, I thought it may have had something to do with my FF extensions, so I used wget. Sure enough, the page ends with "</script>". It's good to see a web company that can't even put together a simple web page.

  36. K T
    Thumb Down

    It's a bug, isn't it?

    That is all.

    Apart from the fact that thank God, I wasn't the only one messing around with the browser zoom function going "WTF?!".

  37. Ed Hume

    Have some compassion for old farts

    Heh. "My age you reach, look as good you will not."

    Wait until you start aging out of your young whippersnapper phase. Can't see the tiny type. Your fingers miss keys so you need to see what you just typed - so you can see if it's what you intended to type.

    Your own articles have their type set too small. I routinely read them in "print" mode, where the font size is simply default - at what ever I set as default in my browser.

    Google is wising up. In ten or twenty years, so will you.

  38. Sarev

    He, he

    Do a Google image search for "Marissa Mayer" and you get the Google image search page back - but a bit bigger :)

  39. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    qwerty

    Looks like a Windows 3.1 edit control with 600x400 resolution.

  40. M. Burns Silver badge
    Boffin

    You know its Web 2.0

    When trivial is touted as innovation.

  41. sonassi

    Revert search box back to old size

    This little bit of CSS will revert the search box back to its original size:

    http://www.sonassi.com/blog/2009/09/11/return-google-search-to-smaller-sized-boxes/

  42. zanto
    Linux

    mostly for i.e. users

    i've stopped going to google.com for years now. i just use the search box in ff. and on elinks, it wouldn't matter anyway.

  43. Roby
    Welcome

    I for one welcome our short-sighted overlords

    I love the new bigger one. It is more fun to use and easier to see. I think text is too small in general on the interwebs, people shouldn't be afraid to use a big font. I increased the font size of my browser to 16pt, but some websites that don't use ems or percentage and define the font size explicitly such as El Reg are still tiny unless you manually zoom the whole page.

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