171–180 of 227 posts
That is genuinely impressive. Never seen anything like it before on any other website. Not sure it's needed now with the great autocomplete but it sure looks really great.
http://drupalmodules.com/module-finder
No autocomplete, though.
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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?
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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?
we're still in private beta, but happy to give invites to anyone here who wants one. just email me rich at blekko.
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.
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.
I think this little change is going to fundamentally change the internet landscape. a) no more long tail keywords. those people will see an answer before they get to the part of the phrase that makes it longtail(so if you ranked for that 5 term keyword...too bad). i.e. if you rank for "best auto insurance companies", you've now lost all your business to those who rank for "best auto insurance" b) much faster searchin…
a) and b) contradict each other
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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…
Google and others have studied the response time -vs- user stickiness issue extensively, and it's good stuff to read - users don't even know what they want.
Example (paraphrased) - the majority of users will say "I would rather see 20 results on the page than 10" - but actual A/B testing shows that the users shown only the 10 results (faster, less information to process) are overwhelmingly more likely to continue using the service.
What people think they want when asked is very often not what really happens in practice.
So if a search engine is giving you results you hate - response time is obviously meaningless - but otherwise, it's everything.
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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?
Are we talking about opinions here? If so, I have mine, and: I agree with him. I might spend 500ms waiting for my search results but my greatest annoyance is still having to spend 10 minutes trawling through SEO 'content' to find a legitimate website.
Sorry, that was the point. We could talk about opinions, sure. But all major search contenders do significant user research into how people will react to much less significant changes than Instant Search. This change had its but user-tested and dogfooded for quite some time.
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 think this little change is going to fundamentally change the internet landscape. a) no more long tail keywords. those people will see an answer before they get to the part of the phrase that makes it longtail(so if you ranked for that 5 term keyword...too bad). i.e. if you rank for "best auto insurance companies", you've now lost all your business to those who rank for "best auto insurance" b) much faster searchin…
a) was also the case previously a) and b) contradict each other
b) no they don't..,A = natural long tail search, where the person starts off with a long tail string. B = the recurring searches trying to find something