Google Instant, behind the scenes

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-instant-behind-scenes.html

by arfrank • 16 years ago

81 45 16 years ago

googleblog.blogspot.com

amichail3• 16 years ago

In user studies, people quickly found a new way to interact with Google: type until the gray text matches your intention and then move your eyes to the results. We were actually surprised at how well this worked—most people in our studies didn’t even notice that anything had changed. Google was just faster.

If this is the case, then what's the point of showing the search results as the user types? It seems that just having predictions is sufficient.

ugh5• 16 years ago

They tested that:

For example, we tried a prototype where we waited for someone to stop typing before showing results, which did not work. We realized the experience needed to be fast to work well.

amichail3• 16 years ago

Cursor down + return is pretty fast.

SkyMarshal• 16 years ago

Is that what amichail is asking? It sounds like he's wondering why they don't just show the results updating with every letter you type, while not even bothering to show the dropdown predictive list of queries you may be typing.

mkelly3• 16 years ago

One qualitative difference: the "I'm feeling lucky" button (which you can use if you hit right-arrow on a search suggestion) has actually become useful. You can start typing, scroll down to an entry you like, and check the snippet of the top result -- all without clicking any buttons.

This is a pretty big deal to people like me who go to great lengths to avoid using the mouse. I've not tried it much because I don't usually search from the google homepage, but maybe I'll try it now.

brown9-2• 16 years ago

Anyone else curious how long those 50 person stand-up meetings took?

smhinsey2• 16 years ago

Even by the scrum ideal of <1 minute per person, that's longer than most traditional "status meetings." Must've been loads of fun.

nostrademons• 16 years ago

The couple I sat in for were 10ish minutes (I think the NBC Nightly News segment has a program manager saying "Alright, 12 minutes"). They were done so that each team reported to their team lead what they were working on beforehand, and then at the scrum, the team leads aggregated everything that was going on with their team.

rozim• 16 years ago

They were tightly run and limited to 15m minutes. Usually only team leads talked and there wasn't much back and forth.

It's more normal at Google to have fewer people and 30 or 60 minute mtgs.

mrtron• 16 years ago

Google Instant is shockingly fast. It is hard to imagine a small startup creating it and having it work for a few beta users. Even harder to imagine Google scaling up their infrastructure 10-fold.

moultano6• 16 years ago

What this is really showing is how fast the underlying infrastructure already was. It had been optimized to the point that it really couldn't get any faster without speeding up the user themselves, so they did that.

loire280• 16 years ago

I, for one, forget to appreciate the fact that one of the fastest web apps I regularly use is the one that searches the entire* internet.

*kinda

inscitekjeff• 16 years ago

I agree. It's an impressive interface. If this really proves to be a very desirable improvement from an end user perspective, it may take Bing YEARS to be able to duplicate the experience unless they had something like this in the works already. ie: It takes lots of coordinated effort to make something like this possible at scale. Congrats to the Google team!

edanm• 16 years ago

Not sure about that. Bing has far less traffic, scaling should actually be easier for them. And Microsoft certainly has resources.

kenjackson2• 16 years ago

Technologically it's not very difficult, IMO, once you already have search engines that are as fast as Google and Bing.

The tough part for Bing, is with fewer searches, their predictive engine isn't quite as good. But this is where the Yahoo deal will pay off.

But all they need to do is fire off predictive searches and bring those back -- and of course, each predictive search only needs to bring back ten or fewer results.

Bing already does the predictive text suggestion. They just need to send back queries along with the actual text suggestion. At worst they'd need to get some more servers. But I fully expect they'd be able to roll this out in months if they wanted to.

Although personally I'd still focus on relevance. There's so much stuff both engines suck at, I'd love for them to fix some of those holes first.

andreyf• 16 years ago

Well, it wasn't really 10-fold. Also, it didn't just mean buying more servers, as maybe most of the work was done in software: this is another feature made possible by the recent Caffeine expansion: http://mashable.com/2010/06/08/google-rolls-out-its-new-and-...

shaggy• 16 years ago

I think the most interesting piece of that article is that they are caching per user results. So not only have they made result display dynamic, but they've made the performance unique to everyone using the system.

SanjayUttam• 16 years ago

That's not much of a "behind the scenes". Granted, this is still rather impressive. Would love to get more technical details on it.

extension• 16 years ago

I'm amazed that users couldn't tell the qualitative difference between submitting a form and find-as-you-type. To a hacker, AJAX is a whole other experience but to Joe User, it's just a bit faster. It's something to keep in mind if your AJAX interface isn't actually faster.

Yet another unconscious programmer assumption shattered.

boredguy8• 16 years ago

They capture my keyboard after I search from the menu bar of Chrome, so I can't hit backspace to return to the previous page. Even if I click outside of the box, any Google search page redirects my backspace into the search box, which also changes the results.

It's rather quite annoying.

pak• 16 years ago

My issue is I almost always search from the address bar of chrome, or the search box of any other browser, so I never see the "instant" effect. I can't remember the last time I actually went to google.com except when linked to see a cool logo design.

randallsquared• 16 years ago

Yeah, they broke one of my search patterns: search for something, read the answer from the results. I do this almost as much as following any of the results, because for a quick answer to a question the answer is usually in the summary of the link. Now, however, I open a new tab, google loads, I type the question and hit Enter, and when I CMD-W to close the tab, Safari stops me to ask if I'm really sure I want to do this.

This seems like such a tiny thing while I'm writing it down, now, but it's frustrated me steadily today; I've context-switched out of whatever I was thinking about more than a dozen times to figure out why I was getting a popup warning. Finally I just turned it off in search settings. The barely-noticeable increase in speed just isn't worth it.

samlittlewood• 16 years ago

I would have loved to be a fly on the wall at Microsoft when someone said - 'That's weird, have you tried google today?'

I assume some of the ajaxy Google logos have been leading up to this - especially the one that coloured in the letters as you typed.

Google Instant, behind the scenes

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