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Google Instant Search Released

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Re: Google Instant Search Released

#131

Post by josefresco »

Experimentalist wrote: post #113
mrshoe wrote: post #84

I'm sorry, but this is a solution to the wrong problem. I switched from AltaVista to Google back in 1998, not because their search engine returned results more quickly, but because their results were much more relevant . In the past few years, SEOs have set up micro-sites on just about any topic I could possibly search for and they've managed to rank highly for those topics. Am I the only one who's sick of being take…

I have to disagree. The "micro-sites" you are talking about, and the long-tail SEO people are complaining about, are nothing new at all. It's been common for SEOs to build and rank sites like that for at least 5+ years. The difference is Google made a big change to it's search algo back in April and in my opinion it was for the worse. It actually ranked bigger sites (bigger than micro-sites but not necessarily the bi…

I think the damage to long tail searches was already dealt long ago when Google started auto-complete on the home page and before that when people started using a Firefox search bar. Auto-results only makes things faster.

This strikes me as very AOLish where people are encouraged to search for what everyone else is (aka AOL Keyword) as opposed to having access to the entire web, unfiltered.

Re: Google Instant Search Released

#132

Post by eru »

coliveira wrote: post #124
pbw wrote: post #69

This is a logical extension of the trend to do ever more computation on every key press. Think spelling correction and auto-complete. But here instead of just a local process every key press invokes hundreds of remote machines, required to assemble a single search results page. It's impressive and decadant to think your cat walking accross the keyboard can light up whole racks of remote machines.

> every key press invokes hundreds of remote machines, Not really. Apparently Google has an improved cache system for the most common keywords. The pre-computed results come from just one machine.

Yes, but your cat won't hit pre-computed results.

Re: Google Instant Search Released

#133

Post by jedc »

fbnt wrote: post #125
mrshoe wrote: post #84

I'm sorry, but this is a solution to the wrong problem. I switched from AltaVista to Google back in 1998, not because their search engine returned results more quickly, but because their results were much more relevant . In the past few years, SEOs have set up micro-sites on just about any topic I could possibly search for and they've managed to rank highly for those topics. Am I the only one who's sick of being take…

Agreed. Seems to me that they're just trying to inflate the number of adwords impressions this way, and not helping me in any way with my search. And it's utterly distracting too. Excuse the negativity.

Why would inflating the number of impressions matter at all when Google makes money from clicks?

Re: Google Instant Search Released

#134

Post by danielnicollet »

I work at a company where we have been doing this sort of stuff for a while now. It's very impressive in the case of Google because of the size of its index and the level of error tolerance of the matching sequence used. I wonder how complete these instant results are compared to the now lame old click-to-submit search results? I tried to test and noticed the count of instant results is slightly smaller but the top items appear to be the same most of the time. Anyone has insights?

Re: Google Instant Search Released

#135

Post by yannk »

zzzmarcus wrote: post #48

Strangely, it's not working yet for me in Chrome (dev channel) but it works in Safari 5.

yes, similar here. Safari 5 & Chrome don't have it enabled. Firefox does. I thought it was related to the use of encrypted.google.com or customized search, but it doesn't seem like it. At least not directly (and incognito mode doesn't help). And I don't want to clear my google cookies which might solve the problem.

Re: Google Instant Search Released

#136

Post by daychilde »

nanairo wrote: post #128
neilk wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your own perception of why you switched may be partially in error. Google has done a lot of research to show that speed matters quite a lot to users. When results appear in less than 250ms the user is much more satisfied than even 500ms. Anything less than a quarter of a second is thought of as "instantaneous" and the user starts thinking of it very differently. Here, they are taking it down to less than 100ms, which…

True. But you'll have to agree that such argument have a diminishing marginal return pattern. 500ms vs. 250ms may be great, but what about 100ms vs. 50ms? Once you reach the point my brain is the bottleneck, what's the point? On the other hand it could be distracting to get something happening in the screen while you are thinking the best way to form your query. Usually when I am about to ask someone a question and t…

The nice thing, though, is that there's an option to turn it off for those that don't like it.

I'm not sure if it'll prove to be too distracting vs. mildly helpful for me, yet.

Re: Google Instant Search Released

#137

Post by fbnt »

jedc wrote: post #133
fbnt wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Seems to me that they're just trying to inflate the number of adwords impressions this way, and not helping me in any way with my search. And it's utterly distracting too. Excuse the negativity.

Why would inflating the number of impressions matter at all when Google makes money from clicks?

Probability of some old man clicking one of the four different links kindly proposed on the top of the page by Google while he's typing his search query is higher than the probability of him clicking the only ad shown to him with the old search technique. I guess.

Re: Google Instant Search Released

#138

Post by izendejas »

orangecat wrote: post #102
orblivion wrote: post #77

Do we really need this? Isn't the time it takes to finish a query the last problem on our hands? Or am I just a spoiled fast typer?

We don't "need" it, but taking Google's stats at face value for the moment, it will save 350 million hours per year. That's not insignificant.

Yea, but at what cost? Are they using more power? I would think so as they not only auto-complete, but also generate countless search results in rapid-fire mode.

For every query, how many more sets of results are returned? On average, it's easily more than one. It's only one when they predict your query.

Re: Google Instant Search Released

#139

Post by _urga »

neilk wrote: post #111
mrshoe wrote: post #84

I'm sorry, but this is a solution to the wrong problem. I switched from AltaVista to Google back in 1998, not because their search engine returned results more quickly, but because their results were much more relevant . In the past few years, SEOs have set up micro-sites on just about any topic I could possibly search for and they've managed to rank highly for those topics. Am I the only one who's sick of being take…

Your own perception of why you switched may be partially in error. Google has done a lot of research to show that speed matters quite a lot to users. When results appear in less than 250ms the user is much more satisfied than even 500ms. Anything less than a quarter of a second is thought of as "instantaneous" and the user starts thinking of it very differently. Here, they are taking it down to less than 100ms, which…

Less than 100ms is widely considered to be instantaneous. And it is instantaneous if you're coming from a world of 250ms. But people can in fact distinguish between 20ms and 100ms. A better definition of instantaneous, for the purpose of UI design, would be that 100ms is the threshold at which people start to take notice that something is NOT instantaneous. It's not enough to target sub-100ms. One has to target sub-50ms. Anything more than 50ms ruins the magic.

Re: Google Instant Search Released

#140

Post by gcampbell »

BonesLF wrote: post #87
jacquesm wrote: post #70

Just 'w' will give weather, but with an extra 'w' ww will give 'facebook.com' as the first result, that's interesting.

Not that strange considering it is the most popular site on the internet next to google.com. If it's trying to predict your destination this is correct a staggeringly large percent of the time. Of course "your" implies the masses. They use Google like we would use the address bar. As someone touched on above with longtails, the real interesting bit will be to see what the Google keyword tool says about search terms n…

It's almost certainly location based - the first result I see for "b" is "bart", which I imagine only applies if you live in the Bay Area (for those unfamiliar: http://www.bart.gov/ )
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