Tyranny of the box

I've now worked on a couple of search interface design projects, and I feel for the people who do this every day.

Google has so strongly defined the search experience that anything other than a single-box search interface upsets users' expectations. A9 just moved away from its innovative panel design to a Google-like one-box design. Ask and Live.com are the same.

More interesting, the two other search players with portal-like home pages recently lost search share to Google:

Google's share gain came largely at the expense of Yahoo, who lost 180bps in August 2006 after consistent market share gains in the past three months. Yahoo's market share came in at 16.7%. MSN also lost share moderately to 7%, down from 7.2% in July.

Ur-portal AOL had a small gain in share. But they have succumbed to the tyranny of the single-box design in their new beta.

There's a fair amount of innovation in results presentation from the minor players. But not from Google, which makes me wonder if search results will follow the trend toward complete simplification.

Interestingly enough, structured query interfaces (e.g. Orbitz and Kayak) don't seem to have diminished in complexity. But one only has to look at the Mapquest search versus Google Maps to know that these too might be reduced to a single box.