Friday afternoon and few office workers are in the mood for a great deal of productivity.
What better moment than for an inspired Google homepage doodle to be released to the wild.
Has to be one of our best doodles ever! PacMan’s 30th anniversary – you can play the game on our logo! http://www.google.com
And wild goes the internet with joy in a bout of collective nostalgic arcade escapism.
I´m more of a Tetris man myself, but hey the whole point of this is celebrating the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man.
So, what´s my point?
Well Google does some great things, let´s not forget, and this one is a proverbial rabbit out of the hat moment, but here we have a phenomenon that people are craving to tell each other about and yet after the “Game Over” message the user is redirected to a bog standard search results page:
And that´s where it went a little flat for me.
My point is, where is the social proof of the success of this action? Where are those tweets that can appear in the Everything search results?
Where are the tweets about PacMan on the Google page?
If you browse with Chrome there is infact an extension to include Tweets above the standard search results. You can also achieve this with a Firefox extension.
The results look like this:
I know the whole Google UI experience is ever fluxy and has recently undergone a huge redesign. A brilliant one at that.
And yes, I also know you can click More, then Update in the left hand panel to view recent Updates i.e. Tweets, but why are they not displaying in the Everything default view of the search results.
Am I quibbling or does Google always not quite excel at the social side of things?
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POSTSCRIPT:
One day on and it seems the Google redirected search result page does now include Updates or Latest results which are Tweets to you and me. Here below is a snapshot:
What can we conclude? Well, it would seem that the learning ability of the search engine to adapt the Everything results requires some sort of critical volume before the tweets are injected mid way on the page like they do above.
So does that make this blog post a complete premature strudle of assumptions?
No, because I would argue that the tweet injection on Google happens very late compared to the Twitter trends where the collective sentiment is true real time.
How late I don´t know. Late enough for the likes of me to postulate about it is late enough. What do you think – Could Google be more social?
ps. You can continue to play Google Pacman