We have a new look!

We have spent the last few months working on a new look for the WebCrawler site. Under the covers, it's still the same search engine, but your interface to it has improved! We've redesigned all the content to make navigation in the site easier, and to make help easier to find. A short Q&A about the new design follows.

Where did the original come from?

The original crawling spider was designed by Rhea Tombropoulos, a Ph.D. student in Medical Informatics at Stanford University. She drew the icon for the original WebCrawler, a NEXTSTEP application that grew into the on-the-web service. If you find yourself yearning for the original look, check out the classic search page.

Do spiders surf?

Well, our spidey does! The new spidey, in all its forms, was designed by graphic designer Keith Ohlfs. IDEO helped out with insight into usability and navigation issues.

vs.vs.

We held several rounds of voting, each time with different critters. In the end, it came down to a three way race between the original crawling spider, Sherlock Spidey, and Surfer Spidey. The consensus was that the original spidey was great because it captured the WebCrawler name the best, Sherlock was great because he was an intellectual, fact finding spidey, and that Surfer Spidey was the coolest. In the voting Surfer Spidey edged out the other two, and became our new mascot!

Won't these new graphics take extra time to load?

Unfortunately, yes... But not much! We worked hard to create rich graphics that would download in a reasonable amount of time. You will find that the new graphics take about twice as long to load as the original B&W image. We have also taken care to make sure the site works well without images, so if you don't load images automatically, then everything will still work!