So here’s a weird thing. When I do a Google image search, I get a screen that looks like this:
What’s weird is that this isn’t what a Google image search looks like. It looks like this:
What’s even weirder is that Google switched to this new look nearly a year ago. The reason I didn’t know about it until recently is because nothing ever changed on my browser. It just kept returning images the same old way.
Very strange. This all came to my attention because a few days ago Google stopped giving me more than one page of image results. When I click on the second page I just get an error message. So I checked around and eventually discovered that I was stuck on an old version of image search for some reason — at least, I was stuck there on Opera, which is my normal browser. But when I cranked up an image search in either Firefox or IE, I got the new version. At the bottom of this new version, I learned, there’s a link called “Switch to basic version,” which is apparently what the old results page is now called. But at the bottom of the basic version, there’s no link called “Switch to new version.” So I’m stuck with a single page of results from the old version and no way to switch to the new version.
And even weirder: after playing around a bit, I discovered that if I left click normally on the second page of image results, I get the error I mentioned above. But if I right click and then click “Open,” the second results page comes up fine. So there’s some kind of difference now between normal left clicking vs. right clicking and using the context menu. Isn’t technology wonderful?
