Google Accessible Search
Friday, July 21st, 2006Some good news for everyone relying on accessible websites: Google is experimenting with a new search engine: Google Accessible Search. The official Google Blog states:
Accessible Search adds a small twist to the familiar Google search: In addition to finding the most relevant results as measured by Google’s search algorithms, it further sorts results based on the simplicity of their page layouts. (Simplicity, of course, is subjective in this context.) When users search from the [..] site, they’ll receive results that are prioritized based on their usability.
To see the difference to regular search results, Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped has created a comparison tool.
I hope this will pick up. With Google now (quasi)officially supporting accessibility standards, it might help further push the issue into the public eye and increase awareness. It’s just too bad that the Google search page, as well as most other Google pages, does not produce valid code itself.