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.