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Google Instant Search Released

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191–200 of 227 posts

Re: Google Instant Search Released

#191
post #150

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…

For me (and I'll admit it perhaps doesn't apply to others), it has almost no effect. I use the firefox search box mostly.

Re: Google Instant Search Released

#192
post #150

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…

For me (and I'll admit it perhaps doesn't apply to others), it has almost no effect. I use the firefox search box mostly.

same, but search box is only good for your first search

Re: Google Instant Search Released

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For now

Re: Google Instant Search Released

#195

Annoyingly busy. I sort of feel like this is a prime example why you don't put engineers in charge of UI. Just because we can is not a good enough reason to do it. Also, having both a dropdown and a whole page refresh, what?

It feels less busy after you've used it for a little while, and your brain has had the chance to adjust to having most of the page change whenever you type something.

Re: Google Instant Search Released

#196
post #137
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even if that were true, then the value of clicks would decrease, prices would drop, and a new balance would be achieved.

Re: Google Instant Search Released

#197
post #121

I often use Google to search for very specific phrases -- error messages, for example, in quotes -- and that doesn't help. It actually hurts. What hurts even more is that Google returns documents that don't contain all the search terms, but where the missing search terms can be found in incoming links (or so it says). If you try to use the allintext: parameter you're almost always considered a bot (why??!?) and your…

This isn't a great solution, but prepend words that aren't showing up with a + sign to enforce that they appear on the document.

Re: Google Instant Search Released

#198
Anyone else find the constantly refreshing search results annoying? If so, do you know of any cognitive psychology literature to explain why? I personally find this instant search infuriating and just want my standard old Google search back, where things do NOT change unless I'm mentally prepared for them to change.

Re: Google Instant Search Released

#199
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.

Not really. Personalization, location, etc. affect a lot. I can't find the page I was reading, but it appears that in just running through all the first letters and seeing what is suggested (a is for...) some users are seeing personalized results. And if personalizations are showing up right from character 1, caching results can't really play a big role. Not at the user level anyways; results can certainly be cached further back, but multiple computers will be used just to decide if you deserve personalizations.

Re: Google Instant Search Released

#200
This is pretty mentally jaring, I realized how much searching is a process that I had practiced in certain way for long time. In a couple minutes playing with it , I found myself figuring out how to search for something again. I know there are objections to the UI, or whether it actually improves the search results, or whether the speed increase is worth it but just from a mental perspective it has made me realize how the act of searching is wired into my thought process.
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