Microsoft has launched its new search engine which is intended to challenge Google. Sorry, guys, but I can’t get past your scrollbar. It doesn’t look or act like a regular Windows scrollbar, and it doesn’t work the way the browser does. I can’t use spacebar to page down. Home or End keys? No, they don’t work, either. When I drag the thumb-like thing to the top or bottom I don’t go to the head or tail of the list. I can’t tell by looking at it if I’m at the top or the bottom of the results. If I skim through the first few pages of results and want to go back to the top of the page, well, I can reload, I guess; there doesn’t seem to be any other way to get back to the top other than hitting Page Up a heck of a lot. It doesn’t look like a scrollbar; one could be forgiven for not guessing what it was. I do like the fact that I can scroll endlessly, but, frankly, you have to scroll endlessly to get through the spam-choked, irrelevant, and frequently duplicate results.
Bad scroll bars are also a hallmark of Flash sites, I find.
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It’s an over-ambitious replica of the Picasa scrollbar, which I also don’t like. If I want to scroll that way I’ll middle-click.
Hi Craig,
Please consider publishing full text in your RSS feed.
Thanks
-Steve
Steve,
Since I post far more often than anyone on TeamB.com, I’ve been trying to avoid spamming the http://blogs.teamb.com aggregated site by publishing excerpts. I don’t know how to put the full text in the feed but the excerpt on the aggregated site.
That said, I don’t really know how many people use the aggregated site, or whether it’s bothersome to have the full text of all my posts there.
the home key works for me, the scrollbar is different from anything that exists today, but is not that bad, you don’t have to click to go to page X, but is not like people uses that anyway, I bet that’s why they did it this way, most people, if they don’t find what they are looking for in the first page, they won’t look any further, they’ll just enter a new search, or look somewhere else
and the Page Up and Page Down still work fine, so you don’t you to use that scroll bar
Home key is working for me now. It didn’t this morning. End still does not. Dragging the scrollbar to the top still doesn’t work. As for page up and page down, I did mention that in the post.
The biggest problem with the new engine is the irrelevant results. But I called out the scrollbar because I see a lot more people shipping bad scrollbars than search engines.
I don’t know it didn’t seem too bad. Sort of like an old Microfiche machine. It is like the middle click but you can control the speed a bit better. I didn’t care for the look if the interface as a whole though, a little sterile.
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