41–50 of 166 posts
This feature has been the bane of my Google existence. I often want to hit backspace to go back a page, but because their search bar steals my focus, I instead remove a letter or two and perform a search again.
I have never, not once, found this feature to be useful. Who doesn't type faster than they can read a page of results?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, there was a lot of bottom-up work, but in this case Instant was pushed by Marissa. A lot of infrastructure had to be built, scaled and tuned before launch, so that the demos could actually serve the millions of users, their wonky browsers or ISPs, etc.
I agree that she supported the launch, but Marissa wasn't involved in any of the infrastructure work, machine planning, etc.
Good riddance. This was a marketing feature more than anything else so google could boast about how fast their search engine was. However, it always had tons of usability problems for no added benefit to the user, especially when refining a previous search, or trying to retype some funky word you found in the results.
Yes, part of it was marketing, but there were benefits, too, e.g. for slow typers, which of course do not abound in this corner of the Internet.
I guess that for the intersection of slow typists who look at the screen while typing, Instant Search is useful. But how big is this intersection really?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that she supported the launch, but Marissa wasn't involved in any of the infrastructure work, machine planning, etc.
Of course she wasn't involved in making things work efficiently and reliably, since that never was her responsibility, but the whole reason all of that had to happen was because she decided to turn what normally would be one of the many, many cool internal demos into a public, differentiating feature (and got signoff from upper management). I'll miss Instant on desktop, for the record. It was a great achievement to i…
I agree with you that she liked it, and signed off on the product. However, we had to scale the infrastructure 7x. That wasn't a VP level of money, that was a BoD level of money. The decision to push the launch was made by Eric.
The most annoying part is still there -- of the home page morphing into the search results page as soon as text is typed. It is a totally nonsensical design. 1) Type stuff into google.com 2) Delete all the text You are now on a totally empty results page. Why is this a sensible design?
Every. Single. Time.
I know, I know, it's my fault. But it's not.
Wow, finally. This was such a disruptive feature. Completely distracting from the moment you interact with the page. This wasn't a productivity bonus in any way, regardless of purported reading recognition rates and eye tracking/movement measurements. No, computer. You wait until I'm finished. You wait until I tell you I want you to do something. You don't jump at every flinch of my fingers. Not all interactions requ…
The most annoying part is still there -- of the home page morphing into the search results page as soon as text is typed. It is a totally nonsensical design. 1) Type stuff into google.com 2) Delete all the text You are now on a totally empty results page. Why is this a sensible design?
Never found this particularly nice to use, at least this will drop their server load a bit.
I'd be interested to see if this is actually true.
They had to return data for many search results on entry, in addition to suggested autocomplete. Now they just return suggested autocomplete. I'm sure everything in google instant is served from a cached cdn, but it's still going to be "some" server load that is removed.