@Jake:
Nice feed back, I especially liked “They’re smart and they can find things. But they won’t think about it, and they won’t find things. They don’t want to be made to think.”

Easy and optional are golden ideas in design.

In fact, I wonder if this could be done automatically by running a small speedtest when the user enters the site. Of course, nothing is perfect so they’d want an option to override it somewhere.

However, some aspects of this I think are a bit complicated. If I understand correctly, when you hover over the link the site loads- but does it stay when you stop hovering? Can you scroll around the site, or is it limited based on screen real estate? What happens if I want to scroll around the results and maybe put my mouse over another result without losing the previous result visualization? Sure, you have the multi-frame thing but that requires more preferences to set up. And people don’t want to think about preferences.

Let me tell you a story about my roommate. He’s a smart guy, and pretty computer savvy. He adapted to Firefox before it got to 1.5, he understands command lines, etc. Definitely smarter with computers than the average computer user.

He also just got his first account with Google ever and has yet to change the settings of his Google homepage.

The reason for this is that it’s a search engine. Sure, advanced internets users like us folk love ‘em. We customize our programs and OS’s as soon as we get them.

But most people don’t. When someone first uses something, they have an objective. If the objective is to just check something out then they’re more likely to take a look at preferences, and they should be available, certainly more so than the current Searchme setup.

But these people are in the minority, and if they’re checking something out they can handle clicking a link to get to a preferences page. The majority of users will just want to search for something. They don’t want to be confronted with preferences before they’ve even used the website.

People say they want choices in this stuff, but they don’t. Not right away, at least. No, they’re liars and morons. And by “they” I mean people using websites. Me, you, everybody. I should clarify that I don’t mean “morons” in the sense that they’re incapable of intelligent thought. They just don’t want to.

Ok, ok, they’re not really morons. They’re smart and they can find things. But they won’t think about it, and they won’t find things. They don’t want to be made to think. If I go to a new search website and just want results, I’m on the verge of leaving at any moment. And if I have to look at a preferences list and make decisions, or not even if I have to but if such a list is presented, I’ll probably go elsewhere. It’s a search engine. It should just search.

I want as little as possible between me and my results. Once I’m using the site regularly, that’s when I want my options. But until then, I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what will work. I don’t know if I want will even work.

I know this will seem pretty tangential, these last ~8 paragraphs, and it doesn’t apply directly to… stuff… but it’s something I think this design is straying towards. There’s too much choice. I know I’ve told you this before, but I’ll say it again: if you give users choices then someone will make the wrong one.

All in all though, despite all my harassment, I like the design. Again, it’s similar to mine (which is where the tangential stuff comes in) and the differences are interesting. Reading over it again I think I might have misunderstood some of the features but we’ll talk about it tomorrow.

In the meantime, I hope you skipped to this sentence because otherwise you have too much free time.