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Google Instant Search Released

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Re: Google Instant Search Released

#161

Post by andreyf »

peterwwillis wrote: post #159
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…

it's funny you bring this up because we were just discussing site performance at work today. what i took away from it is this: speed is mostly relevant when there's a competing product providing similar value and you risk losing business due to inferior user experience. if google were far better than their competitors at providing what users want (relevant search results they don't have to dig through) they could tak…

yes, 500ms can seem like an awful lot when you come from a world of 250ms. but if the results returned from the 500ms are significantly better, you bet your ass users will sit through double the time to get better, more reliable results.

Are you sure?

Re: Google Instant Search Released

#163

Post by pedrokost »

Google Instant will make Google's Web History less useful (if it was of any use before) and easier to trick, since the History records only if you actually press Enter after the query or if you click a results. However a lot of information can be revealed from the description of the results that Google offers and so people won't always have to click Search to get the info they required.

Re: Google Instant Search Released

#164

Post by CamperBob »

smiler wrote: post #152
thaumaturgy wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, funny you should mention that. One of my techs is on a job site and just called in requesting documentation for an older Avaya phone system. Googling for it was a complete waste of time. (Unfortunately, DDG couldn't fare much better.) I find this is often the case when searching for "long tail" terms, like specific models of equipment. There are tons and tons of sites like this ( http://camera.manualsonline.com…

I do wish there was a human curated search engine. Eg everytime you search for something and you find a useless spam site, you can flag it and then it's removed from the search. I'm sure something like that must exist already - does anyone know?

Then the spammers would use bots or cheap Chinese labor to downvote their competitors. It would just move the problem down a level. For this sort of thing to work, the curators must be trusted, which is expensive.

Such an engine might be worthwhile to a small subset of users, though.

Re: Google Instant Search Released

#165

Post by CamperBob »

stellar678 wrote: post #90
brown9-2 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious if users will actually change their behavior because of this though. For example, if you decide you want to go to google.com to search for "online degree", are you likely going to stop in the middle of typing your phrase when you notice some results appear? For me the lag between typing and displaying of results seems a little too slow for this to really happen.

One of the articles I read talked about Google mentioning this....their research showed an average pause of 300ms between keystrokes (crazy!) but only 30ms between eye saccades, so users are looking around 10 times for every keystroke.

If I'm hunting and pecking, I'm looking at the keyboard, not the screen. Those saccades are most likely happening during the typist's search for the next key to hit.

Re: Google Instant Search Released

#166

Post by fnazeeri »

Well that was interesting. I started migrating my blog from TypePad to WordPress last week and it's been "down" or intermittent since then. What's amazing is that Google has erased 5 years of really highly ranked search results.

For example I had the #1 or #2 result for "liquidation preference" and now it's nowhere to be seen. I wonder if the "real time" will turn Google into Twitter...sad if true.

Re: Google Instant Search Released

#167

Post by nostrademons »

sunir wrote: post #158
smiler wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do wish there was a human curated search engine. Eg everytime you search for something and you find a useless spam site, you can flag it and then it's removed from the search. I'm sure something like that must exist already - does anyone know?

Google tried this. It was called SearchWiki. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-searc...

Or was called SearchWiki. It turned out that nobody liked or used it, so it was removed.

Re: Google Instant Search Released

#168

Post by edanm »

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 don't need search results that update live as I type. I need to find what I'm looking for."

You need to find what you're looking for faster. For you, that only means more relevant results, since (this is a guess) you're a quick typist. For slower typists, this kind of instant search could save a lot more than 500ms. It can save them 30 seconds, maybe even a minute.

It might also help teach people how to search. There's obviously some "art" to choosing the right search phrase, and this kind of "search as you type" can help people learn by doing in a way that's much better than before.

Re: Google Instant Search Released

#169

Post by kwamenum86 »

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…

Experiments have shown that 100 Ms is the threshold.

Re: Google Instant Search Released

#170

Post by ugh »

pedrokost wrote: post #163

Google Instant will make Google's Web History less useful (if it was of any use before) and easier to trick, since the History records only if you actually press Enter after the query or if you click a results. However a lot of information can be revealed from the description of the results that Google offers and so people won't always have to click Search to get the info they required.

It also remembers when you were looking at search results for more than three seconds (it will even distinguish between normal searches and those three-second things). Unless you can be done in less than three seconds you cannot trick Web History.
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