[deleted]
Paul Buchheit: Four Reasons Google is still Awesome
11–20 of 107 posts
Re: Paul Buchheit: Four Reasons Google is still Awesome
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instant?
There's a risk that Instant won't enhance the search experience for most users significantly, but it won't make it worse. That's not much of a risk.
When Instant was under development, we had an office pool for "How long will it be before Instant is rolled back, and why?", and two of the most popular answers were "2 days - user revolt" and "1 month - global search outage". Of course, anyone who voted there has egg on their face now because it was a successful launch with relatively few problems, which is mostly a credit to the teams involved and the hard work they put in to foresee problems and fix them before launch. But things looked very, very different when the product was still iterating, the UI wasn't worked out, and there was significant doubt that it would be physically possible to do it.
It's very easy to look at a product in hindsight and say "Duh, that's obvious, of course it's a good idea, why didn't anyone do it sooner?" It's much harder to take a random idea that's been batted around a few times and say definitively "This is a good idea that we can and must do."
Re: Paul Buchheit: Four Reasons Google is still Awesome
#13I suspect risk taking is only encouraged outside their core business.
With what justification? Google has made numerous innovations in terms of search. Think Instant, Goggles, and their shiny new (painfully unusable) implementation of Image Search. Plus they've got a bunch of micro-innovations--the AROUND operator, for example, and the reading level filters.
Re: Paul Buchheit: Four Reasons Google is still Awesome
#14I suspect risk taking is only encouraged outside their core business.
With what justification? Google has made numerous innovations in terms of search. Think Instant, Goggles, and their shiny new (painfully unusable) implementation of Image Search. Plus they've got a bunch of micro-innovations--the AROUND operator, for example, and the reading level filters.
As an example of something really risky, see my comment about a search API.
Re: Paul Buchheit: Four Reasons Google is still Awesome
#15I suspect risk taking is only encouraged outside their core business.
Instant?
Also, that preview window thing you get when you click in the description text.
Personally, it annoys the hell out of me because I'm a compulsive clicker and I really wish there was some way to turn it off permanently but it's definitely another example of a change made to core search.
Re: Paul Buchheit: Four Reasons Google is still Awesome
#16BTW, when is Google going to allow third party developers to enhance its core search results via a search API? Such an API would allow third party developers to add Wolfram Alpha like features among other things right into the core Google search.
I think they used to do this - I could swear that I used to have a third-party plugin that I "installed" on my Google account that would show me JavaDocs whenever I Googled a Java class name. It hasn't shown up in about 3 years, though, and I haven't found any trace of it in the code I work with (which should be right around that area of the page...), so maybe it was discontinued.
Re: Paul Buchheit: Four Reasons Google is still Awesome
#17BTW, when is Google going to allow third party developers to enhance its core search results via a search API? Such an API would allow third party developers to add Wolfram Alpha like features among other things right into the core Google search.
I think they used to do this - I could swear that I used to have a third-party plugin that I "installed" on my Google account that would show me JavaDocs whenever I Googled a Java class name. It hasn't shown up in about 3 years, though, and I haven't found any trace of it in the code I work with (which should be right around that area of the page...), so maybe it was discontinued.
Was there any third party computation/ui?
Such a feature would fit nicely with the app engine to provide third party computation/ui to enhance the core search results.
User feedback would determine which third party code is run by default for various queries/contexts.
Third party developers would make more money when their code is executed more often.
Re: Paul Buchheit: Four Reasons Google is still Awesome
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they used to do this - I could swear that I used to have a third-party plugin that I "installed" on my Google account that would show me JavaDocs whenever I Googled a Java class name. It hasn't shown up in about 3 years, though, and I haven't found any trace of it in the code I work with (which should be right around that area of the page...), so maybe it was discontinued.
Was there any third party computation/ui? Such a feature would fit nicely with the app engine to provide third party computation/ui to enhance the core search results. User feedback would determine which third party code is run by default for various queries/contexts. Third party developers would make more money when their code is executed more often.
Yeah, it was totally third-party, and labeled as such. I have no idea how the technology behind it worked - I was just a user, not a developer.
Re: Paul Buchheit: Four Reasons Google is still Awesome
#19Not to stir the pot, Paul, but was google the only place where your criticisms were welcomed? What about Facebook?
ycombinator?
Re: Paul Buchheit: Four Reasons Google is still Awesome
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a risk that Instant won't enhance the search experience for most users significantly, but it won't make it worse. That's not much of a risk.
When Instant was under development, we had an office pool for "How long will it be before Instant is rolled back, and why?", and two of the most popular answers were "2 days - user revolt" and "1 month - global search outage". Of course, anyone who voted there has egg on their face now because it was a successful launch with relatively few problems, which is mostly a credit to the teams involved and the hard work the…
There wasn't user revolt, but is Instant widely regarded as a success? I find it mildly annoying myself, but maybe I'm in the minority.