GoogleX

[dparm]

Thanks to Adam for telling me about this: http://googlex.foxified.info/

Supposedly Google had it up for about six seconds today. Many people instantly mirrored it, like at the site above. It essentially copies the MacOS X dock into Google. Very cool look. It seems there are several variants of it that have popped up.

For some reason though, Google pulled GoogleX from their site. Rumors are that it was due to copyright infringement. Ironically though, Google has gone after some of the people who mirrored it because it supposedly infringes on copyrights.

Discuss it here (http://groups-beta.google.com/group/google-labs-googlex)

[fturtle]

They threw this thing up almost 3 weeks ago (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1776926,00.asp), and took it down almost immediately just the same as what you describe happened today.

I wonder why they'd do it again..

[dparm]

Holy crap, it's really THAT old?

[fturtle]

Yeah, but it's still odd to note that they put it up again today.

The variants you mention may be the first version of it that they put up (people mirrored it frantically then as well), which I believe was about the same but without the text that appears on mouseovers.

[dparm]

Nonetheless I like the idea of experimenting with a new interface. Google was always a bit plain; not that there's anything wrong with the minimalist approach, but a change of pace is nice.

[fturtle]

It seems a bunch of search engines have followed Google's lead to minimalism. I like how very little must be downloaded to view the engine's front page, but I agree that a lot more interesting stuff (like that OS X homage) could be done without throwing a bunch of bloated junk in there. Mark told me a while back that Apple wasn't against it in the least (they didn't say anything), so I don't see why Google would take it down. Maybe they found bugs or errors or something after putting it up...or maybe it's for publicity (not that they're short on that).

http://php.mll.arizona.edu/images/misc/shrug.gif

[seanf]

It's very slick.