Somebody Call Jakob Nielsen, Google’s Redesign Requires Javascript
The recently redesigned Google Search page violates the company’s own design suggestions by failing to gracefully degrade for users without Javascript-enabled browsers. The new links at the top left of the page are an entirely Javascript-driven interface element, turn off Javascript and they disappear completely as seen in the image above.
As the Google Operating System blog points out, this violates Google’s own suggestions for webmasters which read:
Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
Obviously Google isn’t trying to optimize the homepage for its own spiders, but the lack of a graceful downgrade solution for browsers without Javascript (5-10% of web users depending on what stats you want to believe) is surprising, especially since the elements in question are really just links.
Even the drop-down menu for the “More” option could easy be handled with CSS in those cases where Javascript was not available. Given that fact that almost all Google services (even GMail) offer some sort of stripped down HTML-only option, it’s downright embarrassing that the primary search page can’t do the same.
Hopefully the current Javascript-only navigation is simply an oversight and Google will offer an alternative solution in the near future.
Same as above image, but with Javascript enabled:
