Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Get back the old Google Image Search

If the new Google Image Search — what with its endlessly loading page of images — no, wait, more images — no, wait — is driving you slightly crazy —

In Firefox, install the Greasemonkey extension. Then install the Google Images direct links script. Adding these two items to Firefox will take a minute or two at the most. Now when you do an image search, the crowded, endlessly loading page will switch almost instantly to the old Google Image Search.

If you’d rather skip Greasemonkey, here’s what to do: do an image search, scroll down and click on “Switch to basic version,” and bookmark the resulting page. An image search for a hyphen gives a nice blank page to start with: like so. Adding a keyword to your bookmarked page — e.g., images — makes it easier to call up Image Search.

You can use the bookmark trick in any browser. There’s also an extension for Safari 5, with which I have no first-hand experience.

One annoying thing about the new Google Image Search is that switching to the old (“basic”) version requires scrolling down and clicking a box at the bottom of a page that’s endlessly loading images. A poor, poor choice of design: it’s like having to turn the volume up to eleven before pressing mute. Still worse is that the scroll and click are required (at least for now) with each new search: there’s no defaulting to the old image search. So it’s extensions and tricky bookmarks to the rescue.

comments: 8

stefan said...

Thanks for the helpful suggestions, Michael. I liked the sly Spinal Tap allusion in your final paragraph too.

Michael Leddy said...

Thank you for noticing, Stefan.

Anonymous said...

thank you very much.but, i want use with stylish (CSS) .any sugestion?

Michael Leddy said...

Sorry, I haven’t found anything. Stylish will apparently let you move the switch box to the top of the page — that seems to be all.

Sophie said...

Actually I like to the new one better! It's easier to get an overview on the results you might get from a specific search...

Anonymous said...

Think Google should be renamed "Bungle"

Unknown said...

Thanks for the info Michael! I've been real frustrated with the new google images. Most of the time from page 2 on it was an endless cascade of gray boxes. With images only being seen when putting the mouse over a gray box.

Michael Leddy said...

Thanks, everyone, for the comments. I wonder whether Google will modify this page design, esp. as the new image search seems tied to Image Search Ads. More scrolling: more ads.