Google Instant Search Released

http://www.google.com/webhp?sclient=psy&

by wlfsbrg • 16 years ago

371 216 16 years ago

JangoSteve3• 16 years ago

This is really cool, though I think I'd have to change my search habits dramatically to really benefit from it. It'd probably be better suited for people who don't know exactly what they're searching for. Then again, I wonder if it would just confuse them further.

acqq4• 16 years ago

Correct: there's real chance I'll forget what I wanted to search if I'm presented with something else shiny before! It's dangerous and it will mostly make popular searches even more popular. It's a positive feedback loop, often a bad thing.

nanairo3• 16 years ago

It sounds like it would be confusing... but they let you switch it off, so all the best to them.

jlees3• 16 years ago

The other angle is: most of the time I use the omnibox etc to search, so I don't interact with Instant at all, but having it there on google.com for the few times I am searching for something more complex (misremembered song lyrics are a favourite of mine) is also useful.

RiderOfGiraffes• 16 years ago

Multiple submissions on the same subject:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672391 <- This one

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672388 <- This is an explanation

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672346 <- First

acqq4• 16 years ago

The shortest link to the explanation, for those of us who don't have javascript turned on by default and want to read about it, or who don't see the new interface:

http://www.google.com/instant/

"Google Instant is starting to roll-out to users on Google domains in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia who use the following browsers: Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac and Internet Explorer v8."

acqq4• 16 years ago

Try typing "fuc" -- it's smart enough not to be instant :)

JangoSteve3• 16 years ago

Aww, but I really wanted to search for "fuchsia plants".

davidw• 16 years ago

Works with some swear words in Italian too. Wonder if they compiled a list or if they've got an algorithm that says "wait, this is about to return some naughty results".

sz2• 16 years ago

It's [edit: not exactly] SafeSearch:

Q: If an offensive or lewd word is a fraction of my query, will Google push these results in front of me as I type?

A: As always, we provide options to filter the content you see in search. You can choose to set SafeSearch to filter out explicit content, and parents can lock SafeSearch to the strict setting. In addition, autocomplete excludes certain terms related to pornography, violence and hate speech.

BTBurke• 16 years ago

So how long before we can buy our way to the top of the search term suggestions? What kind of analytics can you do about how streaming search changes the way people compose their keywords? It's an interesting new feature.

JangoSteve3• 16 years ago

I actually wrote a post a while back about Google's search term suggestions [1]. Most interesting fact I found was that Facebook actually has one of the top-ten suggestions for the letter "w" because of people entering "www.facebook.com" into Google so often.

[1] http://www.alfajango.com/blog/google-one-letter-suggestions/

sp332• 16 years ago

what does "?sclient=psy" mean?

pfarrell• 16 years ago

I'm going to guess it means "psychic mode" which they just made a joke about in the presentation. "It's not psychic, but it's clever".

sumeetjain• 16 years ago

The internal codename for this project at Google was "Psychic Search".

rjett• 16 years ago

They're talking about it live right now http://www.youtube.com/google

davidu• 16 years ago

I'm really curious how they will count ad impressions in this new system. Can anyone find any comments on that? Google is CPC, but the number of impressions has a dramatic impact on price.

arfrank• 16 years ago

http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

Excerpt:

When someone searches using Google Instant, ad impressions are counted in these situations:

  * The user begins to type a query on Google and clicks anywhere on the page
  (a search result, an ad, a spell correction, a related search).

  * The user chooses a particular query by clicking the Search button, pressing 
  Enter, or selecting one of the predicted queries.

  * The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of three 
  seconds.

itblarg2• 16 years ago

Three seconds? Yikes. Will be interesting to see how this impacts big money PPC spenders...

rubyrescue3• 16 years ago

Not sure if this was covered elsewhere, but this actually changes the SEO game in a subtle way. imagine you could rank for the term online deg but NOT online degree.

SEO's rejoice, this could be profitable for consultants and linkbuilders.

brown9-2• 16 years ago

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.

eof2• 16 years ago

You forget that you are not the user.

edit: ie not everyone is typing as quickly as you are

alextgordon• 16 years ago

Sure, if you can touch type. There's still millions of people hunting and pecking, especially on mobile devices. It's certainly plausible that people will stop to look at the results.

stellar678• 16 years ago

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.

jerf2• 16 years ago

Did you try it? It doesn't search for the current search term, it searches for its current best guess. The instant search results for "online deg" and "online degree" are identical, because it's the same search. (I compared it to a direct search for "online deg" and it's not the same search.) There's no optimization for "online deg" to be made.

I don't think there's very much SEO implication here at all, actually, as the goal was already to be the top hit for a common Google search, and common Google searches will be what Google Instant already prefers.

rubyrescue3• 16 years ago

i did, and i thought about your objection, but then i thought, nobody is trying to rank for online deg yet... what if they did?

mp3jeep01• 16 years ago

I like the idea that it's the same search for both - think about the number of terms that would bring back adult content based on the prefix, but given the entire term, are something entirely innocent.

shimonamit2• 16 years ago

Why would I want Google to begin searching at 'he' if I'm looking for 'hello world'? Will the instant search list relevant results so early on, so as to save me from typing the whole term?

lhnz2• 16 years ago

Solution: type faster or downgrade your internet connection. ;)

DougBTX• 16 years ago

"he" brings up results for "heart" for me. "hello w" brings up "hello world" results.

jlees3• 16 years ago

It doesn't search for 'he', it searches for the first autocomplete from 'he' - which happens to be Hertz, oh well.

shimonamit2• 16 years ago

Thanks. I should have known they were smarter than that.

pbhjpbhj2• 16 years ago

Looks like "q" is the starting letter for your project name if your punting for it to be the next big thing.

pbhjpbhj2• 16 years ago

* you're

paraschopra3• 16 years ago

I keep thinking that Google is on a mission to make us lazy. What after Instant search? Google Mind Reading Search!

cryptoz• 16 years ago

Google is on a mission to build AI. Perhaps a side-effect of that is lazy humans, but that's definitely not their main goal. :)

paraschopra3• 16 years ago

Smart AI + Lazy Humans = Feelings of Hollywood sci-fi being right

The smart thing about Google is that their progress is incremental in the sense nobody will realize before it takes over their lives. In a way it already has, but imagine your relationship with Google in 10 years down the line. You will be literally hooked to it and it will know what you are going to do next. I just wish Don't be evil stays ingrained in that AI :)

ladon86• 16 years ago

One of the main issues for advertisers (as far as I can tell) is that this increases competition for the keywords which Google predicts first, and decreases traffic for the other keywords.

This already happened with Google Suggest, but I think that Instant search will result in even more users only interacting with the first suggestion.

For example, the term "social networking" will now get far more traffic than "social network", because it appears first. If I wanted to search for "social network", I can't just type it, I have to type it, press down, then press enter. Otherwise, I'm still searching for "social networking".

It creates more of a winner-takes-all market in search terms.

msg• 16 years ago

You can also press the Delete key to cut short a search. I would prefer to hit space multiple times and get the same behavior.

I tried searching for wtf. It lengthens the term to wtfismygearscore, which appears to be some WoW tool. What I don't like about the tool is that it makes my searches too specific! It doesn't know when to quit and the completion is often longer than I want it to be.

Strange.

ugh8• 16 years ago

No you don’t. Type “social network” (no quotation marks) and press enter, Google will then search only for what you typed, without the suggestion. It’s not exactly obvious that you can do that but it makes sense. You can use Instant just as you used Google before and still get the same behavior, they seem to have taken great care of making this behave exactly like before (i.e. typing something and pressing enter will only search for exactly what you typed, pressing enter adds an entry to your browser’s history just as before, etc.).

ugh8• 16 years ago

And it doesn’t break the back button! I was a bit worried about that but you can either make a ‘snapshot’ of the current search results by pressing enter or clicking the search button (just like before only without page reload) or by just waiting a short time (about three seconds), presumably so as to not clutter up your browser’s history.

It’s a really smooth experience and they seem to have though of everything.

zach2• 16 years ago

Managing browser history was the #1, #2, and #3 issue I had to deal with when I was doing a similar project. If you are very careful and clever (I recommend the jQuery history plugin) you can make it work properly, but it's a headache.

Google has made it very slick, although they at least have a fallback: "oops, Google Instant won't work on this browser (cough, IE) so here's Google Brewed." If you bill your service as instant search, you need to work with even lame browsers.

rubypay• 16 years ago

The instant results seem to be served from memory rather than an actual search being performed. For example, try searching for:

zqqx

and after the 'x' is typed, no instant results appear. However, Pressing 'enter' to submit your search will show you the full results.

A new Google game: what's the shortest non-blacklisted key sequence that returns 0 instant results.

ugh8• 16 years ago

It looks like zqqx is (for whatever reason) one of the words for which instant search is disabled. Try the four letter word starting with f, you will see exactly the same thing.

eof2• 16 years ago

kind of cool, but I immediately turned mine off.

I could imagine using it in some situations though, when I am really digging for some information and not expecting my query to bring my desired result to the top few spots.

paraschopra3• 16 years ago

From their FAQ page http://www.google.com/instant/

* 15 new technologies contribute to Google Instant functionality.

Does anyone know which are these new technologies?

jsdalton• 16 years ago

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=673630

(I apologize profusely, I just couldn't resist.)

ArturSoler• 16 years ago

Will some integration be done for those of us that search on the Chrome navigation bar instead of opening google.com in the first place?

ugh8• 16 years ago

From the Q&A: That will be out in a few months. They are working on it.

coderrr• 16 years ago

interesting UI issue/inconsistency (in Chrome)... when pressing tab, it can either complete the current word/phrase or move to the X, so <enter> can either do nothing or clear the search box

res0nat0r• 16 years ago

I for one turn off google suggestions on every new pc/browser I use, it is a distraction to me and actually causes me to type slower. Maybe because I've been in front of a computer constantly for 15 years but I can type my term much faster than being distracted by results and clicking on the dropdown for them.

I just wish I could disable this account wide so every time I clean my cookies/cache in Firefox I don't have to go back to preferences and turn it off again.

swah• 16 years ago

OTOH, with this feature sometimes you are going to change what you're searching before finishing it, because you can already see you're going the wrong way.

Also, it has tab-complete.

silvertab• 16 years ago

Well, it's impressively fast, however, I'm not sure I will ever get to use it considering I do most of my search from the Google Chrome Omnibox and very rarely visit the actual google homepage...

Shakattack2• 16 years ago

Exactly what I thought. It's a great feature, but just going to google.com takes up time. Maybe future integration into Chrome?

jlees3• 16 years ago

It's a UI challenge, but as Techcrunch reports, this may well be in browsers at some point.

josefresco4• 16 years ago

My question is how will this and previous auto-complete moves by Google effect the "long tail" search market. Will this reduce the number of truly unique queries and instead group people into already existing term categories? I know auto complete has been in effect for a while, but I wonder if this will only make it even more effective, thereby changing user behavior and simply re-enforcing the already existing terms.

zzzmarcus• 16 years ago

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

yannk• 16 years ago

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.

CWIZO• 16 years ago

This would be awesome on image search.

wesley• 16 years ago

So, does the referrer still include the keyword phrase used?

nailer• 16 years ago

Could you please link to the actual announcement, not the front page of Google?

Google release their products incrementally, so not everyone has access to new features at the same time.

There's others in the thread who also don't have this in their locale yet and are also reduced to guessing.

ashishbharthi• 16 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672461

pbw• 16 years ago

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.

coliveira2• 16 years ago

> 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.

eru• 16 years ago

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

EricBurnett2• 16 years ago

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.

jacquesm• 16 years ago

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

frou_dh• 16 years ago

When I used Chrome, typing w in the location bar gave www.facebook.com as the first choice (no local cache).

I'm sure it deserves to be there but that's a bit icky if you have no interest in it ;-)

BonesLF• 16 years ago

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 next month(or maybe the month after that). We'll have to see if longtails have fallen off the face of the Earth or not. Maybe the autosuggest will still have a major impact vs. what they see in the SERPs below as they are typing.

Edit: I got Walmart as the first result for 'w'. Could be a location-based decision engine potentially. Fuckin rednecks

gcampbell• 16 years ago

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/ )

exit• 16 years ago

am i overlooking something, or is there no way to use the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button now?

Skroob• 16 years ago

If you hover over a result in the suggestion list, there's an I'm Feeling Lucky option on the right.

Did people ever really use that for anything besides google bomb jokes though?

barmstrong2• 16 years ago

Heard Marissa Mayer say one time that while people don't use it they like the fact it's there (let's them know Google is fun and has a sense of humor).

felideon• 16 years ago

It shows up when you hover over the suggestions.

mr_b• 16 years ago

You can use the right arrow for 'I'm feeling Lucky'.

kordless• 16 years ago

This is a total ripoff of keyboardr.com.

moultano2• 16 years ago

Keyboardr just searches for the letters you've already typed in, not the words it thinks you will type.

zach2• 16 years ago

Or you could say it's a ripoff of zippily.com which I did four years ago over the weekend after Google released their Ajax Search API.

Except that live search was already something that was happening on lots of sites back then. By now it's hard to see that instant searching is even novel, much less a ripoff of any other interface.

Google putting their completion together with their instant search (an opportunity not available to API users, of course) is pretty neat, though.

orblivion2• 16 years ago

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?

barmstrong2• 16 years ago

Wasn't Outlook good enough? Did we really need faster search in Gmail?

This is gonna be one of those things you didn't know you needed till you got used to it, then you'll look back and wonder how you ever lived without it.

orblivion2• 16 years ago

Well waiting for your computer to respond can be really frustrating. Having to finish typing something isn't so bad. For me anyway. So it'll help, but for such a huge infrastructure overhaul, is it really worth it?

orangecat• 16 years ago

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.

izendejas• 16 years ago

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.

chintan• 16 years ago

Auto-complete/Tab complete is priceless! Feels like I'm using Vim on google.com. Thank You!

crux• 16 years ago

Speaking from a UI standpoint, I find the leap of the bar from the middle to the top of the screen to be very disorienting. I know that the middle-of-the-page input field is a real visual trademark for Google, but if they want to push this feature, they might have to move the box up to where it is currently leaping.

Shakattack2• 16 years ago

Agreed, even some smooth movement would make a difference - the jump is very sudden

ugh8• 16 years ago

You would have to test it but I think some sort of non-distracting animation could help (a quick fade-out and fade-in maybe – even if it’s only a few milliseconds long). Actually moving the search bar up with an animation would most certainly either take too long or be so fast as to be equally or even more jarring.

desigooner• 16 years ago

IMO, this change is a little distracting and annoying as far as my searches go. Putting that aside, a question that arises is how will this affect the user in terms of accessibility and screenreaders.. usually autofocusing to fields is not encouraged as far as accessibility is concerned.

Sephr• 16 years ago

Maybe moving the search bar as soon as you focus it may be an adequate compromise.

sukuriant• 16 years ago

I would prefer it if, when Google is in "instant" mode, the search bar is automatically on the top. Either that, or perhaps the search could just be shown at the bottom.

That said, the "jump" to the top is enough for me to disable the instant search. I've wanted to go back to it because it seems like a great idea, but that teleport to the top keeps confusing me, and those seconds of re-orientation negate the enhancements they intended to provide. This is my opinion based on my experience with it so far, of course.

mrshoe• 16 years ago

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 taken to these shallow landing pages smothered in ads? Does anyone else think Google's search results are now far less relevant than they were 5 years ago?

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

AlexC043• 16 years ago

You've really hit the nail right on the head for exactly what I've been feeling some sort of odd, decentralized anxiety about for a while.

While reading your comment I realized that was the problem. Google kinda sucks now because of people gaming the system.

But who else is out there? I'd probably switch my search if I knew where else to try.

laktek• 16 years ago

Maybe to duckduckgo.com ?

josefresco4• 16 years ago

Use Bing, or DDG. A healthy search market means SEO companies have to target two (or more, go DDG!) set of somewhat unique rules which makes it harder to game. The fact that Google dominates means there's one playbook for most SEO.

Bing (or anyone) could really make some ground if they tackled the low quality content SPAM market as opposed to simply trying to be as close to Google as possible so people will switch.

How about some direct ads showing spammy searches at Google compared with clean results at ....

ugh8• 16 years ago

Google is a large company. I’m pretty sure that they have a lot of people working on search quality.

This seems like a popular fallacy (Does it have a name?), probably a result of anthropomorphising companies. It’s hard for a human to solve more than one problem at once and if they do they have naturally less time for each problem.

Sure, there can be similar effects in companies but it’s certainly not inevitable, not as inevitable as with humans, anyway. We just don‘t know whether improvements in search quality suffered because of this new feature. It doesn’t strike me as something search quality people would typically work on, though.

treeface• 16 years ago

It's called a false dichotomy or a false dilemma:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

neilk• 16 years ago

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 is now operating faster than the user can even perceive (for that matter, it's faster than many users can type). So the real effect is that they have now eliminated the need to click on "Search". So now Google is even more interwoven into your thought processes, and other search engines are going to seem unbearably slow pretty soon.

nanairo3• 16 years ago

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 that person tries to give me the answer much before I have finished, it can get a bit annoying.

So I am not convinced this change in speed will bring much benefit, and it risk (from the sound of it) to be distracting. However this is just my gut feeling. I'll still give it a try, and I am sure other people will have different opinions.

It's good to see Google trying to improve the search interface in any case.

_urga• 16 years ago

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.

peterwwillis2• 16 years ago

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 take 5 seconds and it wouldn't matter. the added value of getting what you want on the first try at the top of the page would keep people using that product.

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.

Experimentalist• 16 years ago

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 biggest ones) higher for less relevant long tail searches, presumably to weed out the micro-sites.

So the difference between now and 2 years ago is you are getting a less relevant result list, not that you are getting an SEOd micro-site.

I have a medium-sized website which relies mostly on long tail SE traffic,

Contrary to what many are posting here about this hurting sites that rely on long tail-- my traffic is above normal today. I'm not seeing a decline due to this search change.

I also would not see it in Google's interest to have less long tail searches, since those tend to earn it more money.

josefresco4• 16 years ago

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.

mtholking2• 16 years ago

Agreed. Instead of getting users to better results and having them click through to the site, Google Instant seems to want the user to keep asking different questions until the answer is available in page title and abstract that Google presents.

thaumaturgy• 16 years ago

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/ex/mfg/headline/m/avaya/type...) at the top of the search results.

(Edit: And while we're at it, trying to find information on obscure error messages or documentation for software is at least as frustrating, but for a whole other reason: so many of the results are forum posts from years ago discussing an obsolete version of the software or error conditions that are no longer relevant. For a more specific example, we recently had an OpenSolaris server refuse to boot with the very helpful "Error 16" message; the only thing we could find were references to an out-of-date BIOS problem that no longer applies.)

Google is drifting very, very far from what they set out to do 11 years ago, IMO.

smiler2• 16 years ago

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?

Splines• 16 years ago

This makes me wonder if Google makes the internet susceptible to losing rare data. It's possible that the only solution to your OpenSolaris error 16 existed in a web forum that existed until only recently. If Google didn't exist (and people couldn't find the answer), it's plausible that more questions/answers on this topic would have existed.

Then again, you could always create a new post on your problem in the hopes of attracting the attention of someone who solved your problem, but I still wonder if Google unintentionally promotes knowledge-scarcity.

fbnt2• 16 years ago

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.

jedc• 16 years ago

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

josefresco4• 16 years ago

I switched from AltaVista because it was better AND faster. In the late 90's my Internet connection sucked and Google's lightweight home page helped. Yahoo! as I remember had already gone the way of the full portal experience which meant Google became the site for searching (Yahoo! for Chat/Email/Games). The good results at Google kept me there which reinforces your point.

slowpoison2• 16 years ago

Personally, you can always turn it off. It is probably useful for other people.

aik• 16 years ago

I live in Sydney and used DDG for a while, but mainly switched because Google returns noticeably faster for me and I noticed I became frustrated when waiting for DDG.

moron4hire• 16 years ago

Given that "optimization" has a positive connotation in tech fields, I suggest that we rename SEO to PRE: PageRank Exploitation.

dedward4• 16 years ago

Unless you're on the business end of things and most of your new customers come from search engines - in which case optimizing your site, which offers the products people are actually searching for, to the top of the list (and aren't cheating with giant link-farms....). Good SEO has a lower CPA than just about any other kind of marketing.

Now, if we're talking about SEO where people are link-farming to spam pages just to get ad-hits and get ad revenue and other spammy behavior of no real value to anyone but the person doing the SEO.....i'm all for hte new classification.

edanm• 16 years ago

"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.

dedward4• 16 years ago

Even for fast typists - speed and response time affects your perception of the site subconsciously. The faster and more realtime it seems the more you are going to like it, even if you aren't sure why, or don't even think about it. You may not even realize why if asked why you like it better - but the statistics and studies are there and are solid - so this is likely a very good move on google's part.

dedward4• 16 years ago

You're assuming they were solving a different problem. Have you switched to a new search engine? If not, it's more likely (statistically) that you will stay with google longer because of this new feature - it's now faster and easier to mine through search data. Agreed it doesn't solve the search-spam problem - but nobody claimed it did.

tolmasky• 16 years ago

Faster results may mean better results in an indirect way. If you accept that some searches will require multiple tries before getting what you want, then If you can see the quality of your search results as you type, you can get to what you want faster. Of course you may disagree with that premise.

patana• 16 years ago

You say that this the the wrong problem because you know what you are looking for. But think for a moment, there are lots of people who will put a name in the browser and obtain a lot of queries of people like them. So for people that are curious and like hearing rumours this is a nice tool.

Just an example:

What's new about sex?

Sex ....... (imagine the top suggestions)

What's new about my favourite singer?

What's new about my best enemy?

You .....................

peterbe• 16 years ago

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.

chaosmachine• 16 years ago

I built something like it a few years ago:

http://drupalmodules.com/module-finder

No autocomplete, though.

larsberg• 16 years ago

As did I, back in mid-2003. Of course, it was just an excuse to try out the then-new "Google Web APIs" :-)

http://lars.com/tools/IncGoogleSearch/inc-google-search.jpg

awa• 16 years ago

Bing Instant? : http://www.istartedsomething.com/livesearch/

jcl• 16 years ago

This change has the brilliant side-effect of coaxing users to give more specific descriptions of what they are searching for.

Before instant search, a search term was sufficient if it brought up the desired result in the first page or two, but now users will continue typing until the page they are looking for appears in the first two or three results.

Google could (for example) use this info to come up with better descriptions for subsets of ambiguous searches, improving the relevance of search suggestions.

btilly2• 16 years ago

My opinion is that this is a challenge to Microsoft. "So you want to compete in search, well match this! See whether your server infrastructure can hold up!"

Having used the feature for a while, what I've found is that I basically don't finish typing. I just stop when I have good enough results. At first I found it annoying, but after I got used to it I found it very nice. Now I find myself annoyed that it isn't built into chrome's search bar.

Brashman• 16 years ago

The fact that it's not built into Chrome's search bar means that I will never see it after the 5 minutes I just spent playing with it. I've been searching from my browser, whether Chrome or Firefox, for a long time now.

nkohari• 16 years ago

It's just an asynchronous load of data, so I don't see why Chrome couldn't leverage it as well. Might lead to some interesting UI, actually.

btilly2• 16 years ago

How long do you think it will be until there are plugins giving you the same feature in Firefox and Chrome?

contextfree• 16 years ago

Someone actually built a Bing-based instant search a while back: http://www.istartedsomething.com/livesearch/

It's not nearly as responsive, dunno to what extent that's imposed by MSFT's server infrastructure though.

keegangrayson• 16 years ago

But it doesn't predict what you are most likely going to search for...

mtholking2• 16 years ago

Is Auto-Complete Optimization something SEOs already focus on? For example, trying to get the keywords they rank well on placed relatively higher in an auto-complete list for Google, Bing, etc?

ambiate• 16 years ago

Typically, no. Let us say you have a keyword like 'patio umbrella' to toy with. You've purchased the domain patioumbrella.com and already gained a huge one up in the SEO rankings for Google's algorithm. What's next in line? Creating original content that Google thinks associate with that keyword. Emphasis on "what Google thinks" because Google believes if you're ranking for a keyword, you should be ranking for related keywords. [re: GKT synonyms]

So, in the keyword tool, I search 'patio umbrella' and generate synonyms. I see things like "patio cushions", "wicker patio furniture", etc. Google would give me more rank value if I also created content for these keywords.

Lets say patio umbrella (lights|stand|base) show up in autocomplete (which they do). If I try to rank for all of these keywords, most of which aren't related to my root keyword, Google will be confused as to what my site is actually about.

(This is my understanding and my experience)

joey_bananas• 16 years ago

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?

pjscott2• 16 years ago

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.

alexandros• 16 years ago

I think this is Google's way of training the average user to search like a pro. Many people don't understand that sometimes it takes multiple queries to find what you need. This seems like an extremely effective way to communicate that and encourage users to fiddle with their queries.

coliveira2• 16 years ago

This change may be helpful for users, but will be even more for Google advertisement programs. Basically, they can show more advertisements for each user visit.

For example: user starts typing a long tail keyword search and an unrelated result is displayed. Even though the user was not looking for that specific keyword combination, he will see the results (and the ads) for that keyword.

bambax• 16 years ago

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 queries get delayed or you're shown an indecipherable captcha (they're getting harder, or maybe I actually am a bot, because nowadays I fail to solve every other one).

It seems Google is aiming at some lower common denominator of the general public, someone who can't spell, can't type, can't be bothered to learn a basic search syntax and just wants to know where to buy the latest gadget.

There is a space to be filled for a "Google for grownups".

moultano2• 16 years ago

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.

jules• 16 years ago

I love it. This makes it much quicker to edit and tune your query to get what you want.

danielnicollet• 16 years ago

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?

origoterra• 16 years ago

Well speed is nice but I sure don't want to loose quality of search results for that. Google is fast enough as it is. I would say that it's probably unfeasible to process a query over the full web index so there some amount of corner cutting going on here. What type?

hanibash• 16 years ago

In my opinion, this is the same kind of Google-think that brought about Google Wave. It's extremely impressive, no doubt, but it doesn't seem like something users were clamoring for.

Just as Google will learn a lot from Google Wave despite its low usability, so will it learn a lot from this, whether users really want or use it or not.

Only time will tell if Google's engineering-centric culture will ultimately win for it in the end. Its been all wins so far, hasn't it?

dualboot• 16 years ago

I hate this and thought I'd bumped something this morning when I discovered this "feature" accidentally.

Really distracting the jarring transition.

vaksel3• 16 years ago

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 searching for users = less traffic for you. If you are below the fold...chances are that you are screwed. Why bother reading below the #5 result...if I can just add a few more keywords to narrow my search? Basically the scrolling is going to take me longer, than it is to adjust my search phrase.

c) much more focus on auto-complete. Before you'd see some auto-complete strings, that would show only 2-3 hits a month according to Google. But now this same string might get a few thousand, just because people are automatically shown those results.

Overall I find that it's good for users, good for high ranking websites, and bad for everyone else.

This is going to make the SEO thing much more competitive, since it essentially eliminates the long tail.

VMG• 16 years ago

a) was also the case previously

a) and b) contradict each other

vaksel3• 16 years ago

a) no...results didn't load automatically. Now as you type you see the results right away.

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

ojbyrne• 16 years ago

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.

vaksel3• 16 years ago

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

wikyd2• 16 years ago

I think the opposite will happen for (a). There are still a ton of users who are not very good at using search engines and only do one or two word queries. Suggestions-as-you-type will teach these users how to search more effectively, I think (esp. given your point (b)).

evanjacobs• 16 years ago

I wonder if this will cause average users to begin understanding and using the "tab complete" interaction. That could open up interesting uses in all kinds of apps.

pg1• 16 years ago

I think saving time sales point is the biggest bullshit from G. Google should be more honest to there users. They should tell us that they need more page impressions+ads.

jhuckestein• 16 years ago

I'd really like to use the arrow keys to navigate the results instead of the suggestions.

pedrokost• 16 years ago

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.

ugh8• 16 years ago

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.

xiongchiamiov2• 16 years ago

With link-hinting, it's quite possible to be off the page in under 3 seconds. Of course, the percentage of Google users who use link-hinting is... very small.

fnazeeri• 16 years ago

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.

xiongchiamiov2• 16 years ago

If your site has been down recently, then that's what removed it from search results, not Google Instant.

_zeo8• 16 years ago

This looks more like a "labs" feature than a real improvement. Doesn't add any value to me... glad they allow us to disabled it.

nhebb• 16 years ago

<smartass>I like the way it instantly changes my C# queries to C in the suggest list.</smartass>

hotmind• 16 years ago

Instead of writing a lengthy comment on HN, I wrote a blog post: 9 Ways SEO Can "Best" Google Instant: http://goo.gl/ez2a

It's a spicy title I'll admit, and guaranteed to raise the ire of some HN folk, but that was not my intension.

Pistos2• 16 years ago

This doesn't work at all for me in Opera. Has anyone else had success in Opera?

edit: Apparently Opera is not among the browsers listed here: http://www.google.com/instant/

r4ps• 16 years ago

It does work, you just need to mask as Firefox: http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2010/09/08/google-instant

typedef_void• 16 years ago

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.

mhidalgo• 16 years ago

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.

sashthebash• 16 years ago

The real question is... will this increase or decrease Google's revenue through Adwords on the result pages?

They will for sure show more ads, maybe making chances higher for a user to click an ad, but at least for me, after trying it out a bit, it seems like I focus more on the results themselves when typing, as they change all the time, without giving attention to the ads.

And as already mentioned, long tail searches might be used less often, so you cannot buy cheap uncompetitive ads to drive traffic to your site, you have to use the big keywords that are suggested.

singular• 16 years ago

Try typing 'F#', the instant results are irrelevant to F# the language (probably due to the # symbol), but when you click search they become relevant.

I would prefer it to be consistent :)

ithkuil3• 16 years ago

This happens because the "instant" search results are basically precomputed search results of the "first suggestion".

When you type "F#" google search is actually suggesting you "f to c" and the results is displayed accordingly.

It seems that google is not simply executing the partial search as you type (it would be too expensive even for them)

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1674707

ssn• 16 years ago

Google Instant Search is just too distracting.

utefan001• 16 years ago

Does anyone know of a firefox plugin that will allow us to blacklist sites we don't want to see in our google search results?

Google Instant Search Released

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