Live data from Hacker News

Google Has Dropped Google Instant Search

searchengineland.com

71–80 of 166 posts

Re: Google Has Dropped Google Instant Search

#71
I won't miss it, I disliked searching when I found my result with partial word and see it for a split second but lose it as I finish typing the word, not reacting quickly enough. Having to backtrack character by character to find it was frustrating. I'd rather just click "search" and not have to deal with the letter by letter tweaking.

Re: Google Has Dropped Google Instant Search

#72
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience these slow typists also tend to look at the keyboard while they are typing - not at the screen. Thereby completely negating the benefit for this group of people. 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?

[deleted]

Re: Google Has Dropped Google Instant Search

#73
post #57

I hated the "instantness" of Instant Search but loved the keyboard shortcuts which seem to have disappeared. I used TAB and the arrow keys to select a search result and Ctrl+Enter to open the result in a new tab. It is very, very sad that it is no longer possible to use those.

Download and use vimium. " f" pops up a tool-tip next to every link visible, with a one or two character sequence to open that link.

It is awesome. I love it. Speed boost.

Re: Google Has Dropped Google Instant Search

#75
post #13

This is awesome news. It was always a pain to set up my search engine to have instant off - and of course instant turns back on if you performed a second search on the results page of the no-instant page. I have never once had my search experience enhanced by this anti-feature, and most of the time it's a hindrance, because I'll start reading the search results, then based on that come up with a new query and start t…

Yeah, I worked for Oyster (www.oyster.com) and had NSFW instant search issues all the time -- if I mistyped our site domain with two W's as "ww.o" the Instant Search results displayed a rather lewd image. Uh, sorry boss, that wasn't what I was after.

Re: Google Has Dropped Google Instant Search

#76

I won't miss it, I disliked searching when I found my result with partial word and see it for a split second but lose it as I finish typing the word, not reacting quickly enough. Having to backtrack character by character to find it was frustrating. I'd rather just click "search" and not have to deal with the letter by letter tweaking.

'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.'

I honestly cannot understand your sentiment, how can knowing something you are interested in exists be worse than not knowing at all?

Re: Google Has Dropped Google Instant Search

#77
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think you're being slightly unfair here in assigning credit/blame/what-have-you. 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.

I wouldn't quote numbers (or multipliers) here, but my recollection is that, after a lot of tuning, it was lower than what you mention, at least in the section of the stack that I was involved with. Of course, the board had to give some kind of sign off (which is what I meant by upper management), before even knowing the full price :-), but the case for this differentiating feature was being made by Marissa. It wasn't merely signing off. I don't remember anyone ever bringing up Eric when talking about it. If anyone, it was her, for good or for bad. She stuck with it even if early iterations were clunky, slow or inefficient. I'll grant her that she started with something that I thought unfeasible and almost a pipe dream, eventually seeing it turn into something actually useful, with the help of hundreds (Eng, PM, UX, etc.).

Re: Google Has Dropped Google Instant Search

#79
post #19
post #16

Does this mean we can regain the backspace-to-go-back that's been everywhere since forever, but was killed by Chrome because of instant search?

IIRC backspace-to-go-back was not killed because of instant search, it was killed because users kept going back when they didn't mean to, because they thought they were typing in a text box and weren't.

Yes, it was killed for this reason. Singular hotkeys that drastically alter state are a horrible UI design decision. When commanding, controlling, or altering a program, the trigger should be an explicit action. One accidental key stroke should not be catastrophic.
Post reply on HN