Google Instant Is Anything But a Time-Saver
xconomy.com
xconomy.com
They're known for their extensive testing. I highly highly doubt that they would make such a major change to their main page without knowing for sure that it would be for the better.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20007366-265.html
Or maybe you were being facetious. Tough to tell.
Adding a huge new search feature that pretty much renovates the workflow of the UI is a much larger, and harder decision.
I work in Search, the same department that was primarily responsible for Instant. We're explicitly told not to worry about revenue. For a launch of this scale, Ads is involved if only to make sure that it doesn't bankrupt the company (it wouldn't look very good on the 10-Q to have revenue suddenly drop to zero). But we can and have launched things that decrease revenue if doing so is the right thing for users.
However, the quantity users report on user-satisfaction surveys—"which is better, in your opinion"—is basically whatever your subconscious heuristics tell you is better. If you were consciously presented with the choice before your brain had become entrained to either alternative, you would perhaps respond differently. People don't "like" things that are unfamiliar, even if they have more benefits, and could normally be convinced of this—this is why people react negatively every time Facebook changes its UI, and why New Coke would only have worked if there had never been a Classic Coke to compare it to. People "like" addictive drugs, fatty foods, etc., even when they know that these will decrease their net happiness over time.
In theory, it's supposed to be both user satisfaction and user productivity. In practice, it's quite a bit easier to measure user productivity than user satisfaction, so I'd guess that our metrics (and our decisions) tend to slant that way.
I want to thank your department for the advance search sort on the left hand side, totally non-distracting and much easier to drill through than clicking the tiny advanced search link.
But please stop adding more distracting stuff to search. Like backgrounds, animated interactive logos, menus that fade into view only when you move your mouse, instant results flashing and distracting you constantly. A design like google.com circa 5 years ago seems to have been quite popular for all it's simplicity.
It's interesting, though, how diverse opinions are on various features. I'm far more used to hearing "I hate you for putting a left nav on search. I want my screen real estate back!" And I get jealous of the guy who did the homepage fade and PacMan/Buckyball/colored-balls/Google-as-you-type doodles, because there've been generally positive user responses to those. Google Instant in general had an overwhelmingly positive user response.
most of the ppl crying over this are doing this because now there SEO is all messed up and people can look for things that they want much more efficiently. Consider so many people who rather looked at results that they got rather than modifying their searches. also people will choose top 5-6 results, so if your results are not in top 5-6 they are worth much less.
All this talk is nothing but google hate. if you just dont want to use this feature press enter every time you type.
1) It makes search slower on my slow netbook (all these DOM operations aren't free, you know). So while I type some long phrase, Google does all these meaningless searches (that I don't even look at), and slows down the browser tremendously. (I use Chrome on the netbook).
2) I cannot turn it off. I tried. I went to "Search settings", selected "Do not use Google Instant", saved the settings. It's still on. When I go to settings again, "Use Google Instant" is still checked.
One of my complaints is that I do look at those searches, which derail me. Those results, along with some of the completions, are often related and interesting, but not actually what I was looking for, so I go off on a distraction quest with "oh, that's interesting", before I finish actually searching for what I had intended to search for. Possibly a personal failing, but I definitely so far feel like Google Instant is adding one more distraction to an already-distracting internet.
It sometimes feels like a Google Instant version of the six degrees of Wikipedia game: which topics completely unrelated to what I'm supposed to be doing can I reach via one- to three-word prefixes of search phrases I'm legitimately looking for as part of something productive?
3) I can no longer use command-enter to put the new search results in a new tab.
4) Sometimes it lets my type out a modification to my search but then reverts back to the old one.
5) Closing the tab/window search results still trips the alert for unsent form data.
So far, the only way I've found is to turn it off is to disable javascript when searching.
In my opinion the behaviour of "Turn instant off" should be that the instant UI is still the same, but results aren't fetched until the user presses Enter, and have a third option for the old functionality.
More results = more time reading results, = more ad impressions. If you hit two letters and it seems to have decent results, you're probably going to look to see if it is what you wanted, rather than finishing your search term. Good for Google's income.
In addition, on the other side of the equation: if you don't know exactly what you're finding, more results more quickly means you're more likely to find exactly what you were looking for... which is good for Google, because you'll come back, and good for you, because you found what you wanted.
More time is more time, but I typically visit Google for all of 5 seconds. Having it take 10 seconds to find better results (and in a few wide-ranging searches, I definitely got better results due to the immediate feedback) is worth it to me.
The only conceivable impact on ads is that traffic will shift from long-tail to shorter keywords as people find what they need earlier in the search process. The exact impact this will have on click prices is unclear.
Could've misinterpreted, though.
2) As long as I'm criticizing, I also use quotes in about half my searches, but Google's type ahead feature strips them out rendering the function useless.
3) OK, a rave about Google's search tools...being able to search in past 24 hours, week, month, year, etc is wonderful when trying to find an answer to a specific technical problem.
But Instand? I turned it off within a couple hours. It's too distracting.