@ About, The layout / Ease of use @

Google is a website that I visit every single day, multiple times. It's like the yellow pages of the web, a big directory to other websites. Their homepage is just the Google logo and a search bar with two buttons "Search" and "I'm Feeling Lucky" - I'm feeling lucky just redirects you to the first page on the results list no matter what it is so you can miss out the reading through all of the other web pages you might not want.

This is helpful and works for things like searching for YouTube and other well known websites because more likely than not it will be the first result you want but I find it very unreliable for more broader search terms. Things like "Who has the worlds largest..." because you will get multiple different answers and you will need to filter out the rubbish. Otherwise it will save you some time but clicking I'm feeling lucky.

Google is very easy to use now thanks to its new "Google instant" feature, which gets results to appear as you are typing. There is a very big flaw with this though, if you are looking down at the keyboard and you cant touch type then what good is this feature? You will only look at the search results when you look up anyway, so all it does is save you hitting the return key, and how hard is that?

@ Search engine, Results everything else @

Google searches normally take milliseconds and their result time is displayed at the top of the search results when you type something in - The more precise long worded results take much longer than this, but I have never had any search take more than 1 second. The search engine also lets you find images and news, which is helpful because it filters out all web pages, unrelated to this - You can just get images, which can be tailored to your search, or news that is most recent, or most important. This makes Google a powerful news website too, it will update with all the latest news stories within minutes of it going online. Images appear in any way you like, whether you want them to be a certain size, colour or even to an exact custom size of pixels. This means Google is very precise and in my experience, accurate enough to display what I want, and filter out the junk I don't.

@ Overall @

Google is a very accurate and refined search engine, I love the fact that its fast and has a ton of websites in its directory but I think some features like I'm feeling lucky and instant search are a little bit pointless.