Common Sense eCommerce

The other day, everyone probably noticed that Google shifted their links line-up to the upper left corner of the screen from the center of the screen. Another not so obvious change is that they eliminated the ‘even more’ choice from the ‘more’ option.

As of this writing, these are the options you get:

The old Google ‘more’ gave you these choices:

Note that you could click ‘even more’ to get to their whole suite of products. Looks like they’ve eliminated the ‘even more’ thing. Needless to say, a lot of things are missing from their new ‘more’ list. But most notably is the Directory (ODP aka The Open Directory Project).

Could it be that Google finally realizes that the ODP is not worthy of front page exposure or linkage? After all, who actually uses directories these days? The ODP has long been criticized for being slow, unwieldy, and not providing the quality that was part of its original goal.

It wasn’t too long ago that Google had the ODP Directory link among their 4 main links below their name. My how times have changed! Now to be fair, there are plenty of other products left off the list from the main page, but for some reason, the ODP/Directory link stands out the most.

You can still get to the entire list of products via some of the product screens (like Blog Search), but I have a feeling Google hasn’t gotten around to changing them yet. The other way to get to the entire list is to log into your Google account and click “My Account”. Under the section “Try something new” is a link to ‘more’ that goes to all their products.

But bottom line, there is no longer an indirect link from the home page to the ODP/Directory and certain other products - although you can certainly ‘Google’ them.

Tags: Google Home Page, Google Products, Google Directory, Google ODP Link

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