It’s almost always entertaining sparring with Jason Calacanis. While his minions will probably miss the point and see this as some shallow flame, I hope he rolls around what I’m seriously suggesting that follows. Something other than a lame shrug of the shoulders.

Calacanis has an opportunity to do some exciting things and really break out of the AOL ‘we’re just copycats these days’ meme and instead rolls out a search engine that looks pretty much like every other search engine we’ve seen for the last 10 years.

Yeah, big deal you can search through top Netscape articles that have been voted up and on by a small minority of the world. Some of those articles/links/videos that have been submitted by their own paid submitters hired away from digg. Microsoft may have been blasted for trying to get rid of span links with their Live Search but at least they are trying to do something different with a core design that has remained largely unchanged for the last 10 years. Why couldn’t Netscape do something innovative with their design?

When I challenged Jason in his comment area on this very point he responded with:

TDavid: Folks have put news headlines up top, but they have never put social news headlines up top in the default search–that’s new.

I’m not looking to do something crazy, but something that helps users.

Also, users can do just plain old web-search as well.

keep hating

Thanks for making my point, Jason. Wasting vertical space atop for 150-250px of garbage (recommended ad search results, no thanks) that isn’t something users want, need or find helpful; it’s not helping the users. Ask users what they want. He and I have been down this road with one of his WeblogsInc blogs and some accidental obnoxious ads that slipped through. He won’t ask users what they find helpful, he’ll try and answer that question for us. No thanks, Jason.

Netscape is just copying a familiar design formula by adding one marginally “new” feature. It’s DiggClonism at AOL Netscape part two.

I’m not hating, I’m telling it the way it is. Get a ruler and check it for yourself. Do you like having less space or more for the results without scroll? Hating would be saying it sucks and not giving any clue as to why it sucks. I try to do more of the latter than the former except when it looks like something we’ve seen dozens of times before only with a new gloss of paint and logo.

Netscape can and should have ads along the right column, but give the search results top billing and drop the oversized Netscape logo eating up space for no reason. We know the brand, we know where we’re at and if you need to tell us then use something small in the big white space along the right (horizontal red arrows pictured above). Until somebody brave enough to do this gets back to caring about the people actually searching, the response will be ho-hum, just another search engine.

Just another search engine. Maybe others will be nice, smile and churn out flowery prose about a lemon, but as long as I have anything to do with it, you’ll never find that kind of coverage here.

Stop trying to tell me what I do and don’t like. I know what that is and it’s usually something new, different, innovative and risk taking. Not slapping a rather obvious mashup search engine atop a worn out design with the same sucked up, wasted vertical space.

Maybe this link will help the Netscape design team for the next version. That, or the screenshot above. It’s the candlestick in the library, Colonel Calacanis Mustard.

• AOL loses Calacanis: You’ve Got Bail
• Slashdot Firehose brings readers into story selection process a la digg
• Calacanis plays limp personal attack card against Kevin Rose
• Design and search engine optimizing skills together in demand
• Vertical space search engine comparison test results
• New Windows Live Search says goodbye to pagination