Google Instant Search Released | Hacker News Reader

Google Instant Search Released

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371 pointswlfsbrg216 comments

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.

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.

Maybe to duckduckgo.com ?

i'll try it for a week and see how it feels. :)

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 ....

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The nice thing, though, is that there's an option to turn it off for those that don't like it.

I'm not sure if it'll prove to be too distracting vs. mildly helpful for me, yet.

Experiments have shown that 100 Ms is the threshold.

For now

I think speed beyond a point doesn't add much to the experience. One would spend at least 2-5 seconds to check out the results and minutes to find the right article, few milliseconds would not matter.

Instead if they return 'good results' in 1000 milliseconds also I would continue to use them.

If you examine the empirical evidence this is patently false. Milliseconds, on average, on the whole, in the long run, at scale, however you want to phrase it, do matter.

in mission critical applications. I really hope there is some good competition for google.

I have to stress again on what the first parent commenter. I am a more genuine SEO person myself and sometimes it is just so annoying that google doesn't even invest in cutting down all the spam on first page result.

Almost seems like they are focusing just on the technical scale & adwords impressions. Given the talent at Google it shouldn't be hard to put in checks for gamers without anything useful on the site.

PS: disagree but down vote somehow doesn't make sense. There is nothing offensive or irrelevant in my comment.

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.

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.

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.

Are we talking about opinions here?

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.

IANASEOE, YMMV, HBD, ETC. but for us, yes. the site of my company was balls slow yet managed amazing feats of capitalism, mostly due to a faithful userbase in the face of faster and cheaper alternative sites. value won out.

an example: Steam, the game delivery system, takes longer to deliver and properly execute games than it takes to buy one from the store, install it and run it. but you get more value from steam so people sit through hours or nights/days worth of downloading to run its games.

Good point about Steam. It really does suck balls compared even to the vast majority of web apps. Ditto for iTunes: slow as balls sometimes, but I still use it to buy music sometimes.

Still, a competing product will win both over if it can get sub-100ms response time for all of their UI interactions. Buy and listen to a song? Imagine hearing it instantly after you click "buy & listen".

The results would likely have to be significantly different.

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.

> 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

Even if you don't have competition, you leave the door wide open if requests take 5 seconds.

There's also indirect competition ... like a lot of people type the name of the service they want directly into Google's search box ... a practice which would stop if it took 5 seconds, because accessing your local bookmarks would be faster.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I liked the small satisfaction I got from 'X'-ing out spammy sites!

I believe it only had an effect on your personal view of Google. Otherwise, it would have been abused by competitors and 'SEO experts'.

I would've used that more if X-ing them out kept them out! Afaict, it only removed them from that particular search, and if you searched again, they'd show up again.

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.

blekko lets you slash out individual sites from the search results. The exclusion just applies to you so spammers can't downvote reasonable sites. Has been popular to eliminate ehow.com from results. ehow isn't enough over the line for us to ban from the crawl entirely, but a lot of people don't ever want to see them in their results.

we're still in private beta, but happy to give invites to anyone here who wants one. just email me rich at blekko.

Do you have a predefined list of 'These are SEO sites which add no real value' sites which I can include by default?

That's a good idea, thanks. We'll add something along those lines...

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.

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.

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.

But in the weeks or months before bidding behavior adjusts downward -- pure gravy for Google!

I doubt that they did this for a short term (weeks of gravy) gain.

I also don't think that it's a case of increasing impressions. I do however think that it allows them to display more ads, and therefore increases the chances of an ad being relevant, and as a result more clicks.

Because you're now getting accustomed to the results changing as you type, having different ads appear as you complete your query is not more obtrusive than the core function.

As an example, searching for employment tribunal brought up about 5-6 different ads (just in the main results area, not counting the sidebar) whereas without instant, their inventory is limited to three.

I would say that where there are multiple options to a character sequence it gives them better value per ad as well as they can pick the ads that are worth more, until of course the character sequence excludes them.

So in the end, you've got increased inventory and better value per ad for Google, increased speed and responses to users. Win-win

Though there are more than two parties in the search ecosystem, the tail-optimised sites are going to be left out in the cold, not necessarily the small ones, but anything that relies on 2nd page or below the fold traffic.

This may or may not be a good thing for the internet, but it's going to hurt a lot of companies.

By the way, not sure if anyone else has noticed this, but it's got a definite sense of history enabled as well, with subsequent queries for the same terms being much quicker to latch onto the directions chose in previous instances.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

"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.

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.

The first few searches I queried google for this morning didn't have this instantaneous result feature. This afternoon, it did, but I didn't notice it until I actually became frustrated when I would change a query and click "search", and the results didn't change. It took me a minute to actually notice how the results were dynamically changing under me.

It may take a day or more to get used to, but it really does speed up the workflow.

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.

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.

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 .....................

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.

a) was also the case previously

a) and b) contradict each other

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

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

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)).

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.

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.

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.

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

Marissa Mayer apparently said: "Sometime in the next few months this is something that will be activated in the browsers"

via: http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/08/google-instant-chrome/

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.).

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.

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.

You forget that you are not the user.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

In the live webcast they said that they use auto-complete to populate the instant results. Typing "online deg" auto-completes to "online degrees", so that's the query used to generate the instant results.

"online deg" probably isn't the best example, but there are still going to be cases where a prefix autocompletes to a different target than the final intended search, that SEOs for the final intended search will want to start ranking more highly for. Finding those cases will be part of the fun.

Ask it another way: do you think a service that shows what the current google autocompletions are for every prefix of a given term becomes more or less interesting to SEOs after this announcement?

no - but I thought a really good example was when I typed in HAHA and saw that one of the options presented was:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I clicked on it because it was so much funnier than the rest of them.

Turns out: affiliate link.

Or some sort of americanized japanese dating porn or something ... couldn't really tell.

Still. I definitely agree that it completely changes the SEO game.

I think what ruby above is saying is that with enough websites, urls and content, an SEO attack could turn 'online deg' into a valid keyword.

Google auto-completes brands and keywords that only have 2 or 3 website references (I know of a site in stealth and I just tried it, and it worked. Google has indexed their homepage and title, and as I typed it in it auto-completed their name, with only a single website to reference).

"an SEO attack could turn 'online deg' into a valid keyword."

If you have that much power, you probably have a better way to spend it. Also I would bet that suggest keywords come from user searches themeselves, not the web. That's why I suspect the impact of this is probably relatively minimal.

Call me crazy, but I think Google just might have considered the SEO impact before deploying this. If it's not literally on a checklist somewhere for deployment of search features, I'd be stunned.

Actually there is a big section of the SEO world that focuses on the long tail keywords. This change is going to harm those folks, but up the reward for anyone that does rank highly for the frequently used terms. Good and bad, hopefully this will lead to less spammy junk, but also reduces the amount of real estate available for new entrants (or at least makes it more pricey).

for example, just type 'degree ' (make sure there's a space - you get results for "degree symbol" (or at least I do) - now all i have to do is rank for "degree symbol" and put links to my online degree affiliate links...

there are certainly keyword results that are a) in autocomplete, b) substrings of keyword results also in autocomplete, c) easier to rank for than the longer phrase.

I think topic-modeling (a la the Latent Dirichlet Allocation article posted about seomoz the other day) will make this difficult to do (at least without confusing the people you want to convert).

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

By definition it won't affect PPC spenders at all unless someone clicks on the ad. You can only buy CPM ads on the AdSense network.

It has the potential to drastically alter search, which thus would drastically alter PPC. The likeliest negative outcome is the gradual disappearance of any traffic driven from long-tail search keywords.

It won't affect PPC (pay per click) spenders. It will only matter in terms of CPM (cost per impression).

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.

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

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.

The fact that you see location and personalization affects the search result doesn't actually mean that they perform a real search using the query that you are actually writing in your search bar.

One possible way (I'm not sure exactly how it works at google, but I can guess) is that the search result is computed in many steps, one of which searches the indices and generates a list of relevant results, which then are passed to a personalization layer which modifies (reorders, merges, trims) the index results and finally it's passed to a presentation layer which renders the html page (perhaps there are other layers too, irrelevant for this discussion).

So, the "instant" search would basically replace first layer, the actual search in the big indices with a precomputed search list for each phrase generated by search suggestions (or a cache of these, which is filled by actual searches if the element is not present). The personalization layer would be free to do things to that precomputed search results, incurring into smaller load because of several reasons: a) fewer users have personalization and on fewer b) personalization has to access less data, and the whole search retrieve functionality is more IO bound than cpu bound.

As for location, there could be one of these 'caches' per location.

I'm sure that they don't do any query "as you type" because the 'instant' page result is always the result of the first "search suggestion". Try to type "F#" (as user 'singular' suggested), the first suggestion is "f to c", and the search results are about temperature conversion.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

True. I guess it depends on your working pattern.

Personally I start with the browser's search field, but then (dunno why) if I need to make some changes I do it in google page itself (about 50% of the time, I'd estimate). So I think It will just annoy me to have Google try to give me results a fraction of a second earlier like an overly keen student: I personally don't feel the need and instead I feel it will disrupt my thought flow.

That said, I am not criticising Google. I think it's one impressive piece of technology and much kudos to succeed. And as you pointed out there will be many people out there who will be able to add this to their searching procedures, and for the rest of us we can always disable it.

It's win-win. :)

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

If people like this and it makes search more server-intensive to run, that works in Google's favor by making it more expensive to compete with them on instant search. They're the champions when it comes to infrastructure, and they know it.

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.

I built something like it a few years ago:

http://drupalmodules.com/module-finder

No autocomplete, though.

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

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

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

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".

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.

AFAIK not SafeSearch but "in addition," the second part of your qute.

You basically have to press enter if you want to search for a term with possible pornographic, violent or hateful content (that’s what they just said in their Q&A). That seems like a sensible solution to me. Safe Search doesn’t figure into it.

They probably do something like: if a search term returns a high density of SafeSearch-flagged top results, then don't autocomplete.

and if it doesn't autocomplete in the plain old search suggestions feature, then it will not appear in the instant results, because these are precomputed results for queries that are generated by the suggestion engine.

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.

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/

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

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...

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

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

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".

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.

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."

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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

* you're

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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)

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?

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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?

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?

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.

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 :)

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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. :)

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 :)

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

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?

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).

It shows up when you hover over the suggestions.

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

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

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.

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/

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

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.

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

Really distracting the jarring transition.

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.

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?

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

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 ;-)

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

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/ )

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

This would be awesome on image search.

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

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

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

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

Google Instant Search is just too distracting.

This is a total ripoff of keyboardr.com.

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

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.

what does "?sclient=psy" mean?

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".

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

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.

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.

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