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Google Suggest Dissected
sammykrupa writes "Google suggest Javascript code dissected and rewritten for all of you web developers out there. Cool piece of web reverse-engineering!" Joel Spolsky astutely notes that this will raise the bar in terms of how people expect the "internets" to work.
Dyslexic users of slashdot, rejoice!
Let's think if the way people search for stuff.
1. Try something specific
2. Try something less specific
Number 1. brings up no results on Goggle Suggest, number 2. brings up 523,334 results. Impressive, but how has this helped us search for 1. ?
Let's try an example, lets look for "C# structs"
1. Enter "C# structs" - no suggestions.
2. Enter "structs" - 425,000 results.
Grrreat.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
Here's what he was talking about:
Google with Auto Complete on Just start typing in the search field.
It's a beta feature.
I don't know how happy google is about this, but there is already a FF extension to put suggest in the toolbar. Great plugin and also amazing how fast somebody implemented it!
Unfortunately Google Suggest has really no use. If you know what you want to search for, you search for it. Suggesting search terms isn't really going to do anything apart from distract you. Hopefully this technology will be used for other things where it actually IS useful.
Eventhough it's an M$ spawned horror - It has brought a new revolution to javascript. Now it can load data from the server without having to refresh the screen. Flash has an XmlSocket , but I never see anyone use it till now (pointers please).
:)
Eventhough Google suggest looks great, I'd vote on CGI::IRC as the biggest killer HTML/Javascript browser app.
Clientside Javascript is powerful, we never realized how much
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Try typing "porn" or "sex" or "cock" into Google Suggest. It doesn't come up with anything. I started to get suspicious when I typed the letter x to see what would come up, and got 4 or 5 variations of "xbox" but not a single "xxx" or "xxx porn" or anything.
Interestingly enough, they DIDN'T censor the racial slurs. "gay nigger" happily suggests "gay niggers from outer space" among other things. Also, type "tub" and one of the suggestions is "tubgirl".
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Google suggest is a neat idea, but a potentially destructive one.
Small sites should *not* try to do this kind of thing on a live site. The amount of pressure this could put on a bad database structure (or even a well formed one) is considerable. Think about how many database hits a user could perform in a very short space of time: (user enters something, (database hit) backspace (database hit) types another letter (database hit)), then multiply it by a hundred or more people if your site gets a moderate amount of traffic.
Google can get away with this because they have considerable bandwidth, and large server farms. We've been seeing people trying to copy google suggest for the last couple of weeks in #javascript/freenode and in #php/freenode. The people trying to copy it generally do not understand how potentially bad this can be for a single server.
Anyhow, my advice is, don't do it unless you have the resources to scale your site. The cost of such an insignificant feature (lets face it, all it does is save the user one or two clicks) seems like it outweighs the gain. If you do decide to do it, and your site gets popular, and you're on some kind of shared host, your sysadmin is going to hate you, and the other site admins will probably meet you at your house, torches in hand.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
LiveSearch does something very similar, is Open Source and exists since April ;)
If you look for more XMLHTTPRequest examples, which tightly integrate JS and PHP (other server side languages would be possible), see JPSpan.
I don't quite understand all the hype about Google Suggests. The technique for doing it exists since at least 2 years on Mozilla (and even longer on IE). Therefore, doing something like that was possible since a long time, but maybe everyone was just scared of using JS for "serious" stuff..
People know when they're sitting behind copious bandwidth. And you could well grow accustomed to an all-text page weighing the better part of a megabyte, due to a heinous amount of information parked in hidden JavaScript data structures, giving you that near-whiplash inducing responsiveness.
In fairness, Google Suggest, like Gmail, works very nicely for me on a 56k dialup. Gmail takes a few seconds for its inital load, true, but then it's like lightning. Suggest doesn't even have the slow initial load, since webhp.htm comes in at only 3.6kB. I'm very impressed.
Now I've no doubt that the bandwagon will bring us massive slow bloat as everyone gets his dog to code up vaguely similar functionality, but Google haven't done that.
I've looked at using the XMLHTTP object a couple of times in the past, and noted that this is partly how Google Suggest works.
XMLHTTP is a COM object included with recent versions of Internet Explorer. You can call it from client side JavaScript in a web page. The object will make a request to the URL you specify, and return the result into either a string variable, or an MSXML DOM object. You can then have the javascript output the results to an object (eg, a div tag) on the page without doing a full page reload.
I wrote a small tech demo that implemented a virtual tree - so when you expand a branch in the tree the client only retrieved the data it needed. This was borrowed from the approach the MSDN web site uses. The advantages to it are that it doesn't download the same data over and over like when you expand a branch in a server side tree. You also don't have to do any work at all to remember the state of the tree since there's no full page refreshes involved.
Google Suggest is similar in that it is a virtual list rather than a virtual tree. A virtual list allows you to list lots of items and jump around in the list without needing to download the entire data set when the page was loaded.
Another use for this would be dynamic forms - forms that alter the state of controls based on selections the user made in previous controls.
The biggest suprise to me was that Google have implemented this on a site live to the public. In using XMLHTTP I found it a little bit prone to locking up the browser when waiting for responses to requests. Additionally it's Windows only, so could never have been implemented on an external web site.
I'll be looking with interest at the Mozilla side of Google's implementation, since I didn't think an equivalent existed until now. Two different implementations of the same functionality is still going put a damper on the technology though.. different code for different browsers is usually more trouble than its worth.
What you say might be true for us geeks, but have you ever seen how standard users do web searches? They begin with one-word searches, and if and only if the results don't satisfy them do they refine their search.
Engage!
1. Google performs several possible searches for each key you press
2. Google already knows the estimated number of results for millions of queries
Both of these suggest a heck of a lot of computing power. This type of thing might not scale up for general use in the near future - but still...
we're talking massive computational power and one of the largest databases ever created.
I'm a bit worried the Googleplex is going to wake up one day and declare to all us 'organics':
"yo bitches - you work for me now"
I fear that might be the case. I learned to code HTML and to put a decent webpage, designed the way I wanted it, online with relative ease, at the age of 14. It took time to learn it, but it was fairly straightforward - I wanted a large header in Verdana, I put in "FONT FACE" and "H1" tags, I wanted a table with a specific background color, I put in a "BGCOLOR" etc.
Today, we have two languages (XHTML and CSS) instead of one (HTML), and while it certainly does a lot to improve interoperability and platform independence, it is two languages to learn, not one. Throw in stuff like JavaScript, and you have even more.
Of course one can choose not to use XHTML and CSS, but that's not the way we want it, right? We want people to use the standards, to write code which won't crash Firefox, or not use proprietary solutions. Doing this is taking more and more effort. We have the skills and time to do and learn this, but not everyone have.
If we want a wide adoption of standards, and an Internet for everyone, where everyone has equal opportunities, the only way is to make the standards easy to use, so people will use them of their own free will.
Otherwise, in 10 years we'll be designing our fancy webpages, while the Joe Users who don't have the time or skills to learn the 13 languages required have no choice but to hire a professional, or use a crappy proprietary solution which won't allow them to take their ideas to their full potential, and this is a great loss for everyone.
Saying "You must do *complicated thing* because it's the specified standard!" will only work with people like us.
We have something called the disability discrimination act here in the UK, which pretty much rules out many interesting uses of Javascript if things like screen readers can't process them, and if there's no other way of providing that enhanced functionality to disabled users.
As others have commented here, I'm not convinced that the Google feature is in fact much more than eye-candy; and thus, since it doesn't really add any functionality, isn't really covered by the DDA. However, as soon as it actually becomes useful for something, then it will be covered; and I don't fancy the job of getting JAWS or something like that to interpret the JS in a meaningful way!
That differs from the well known "nothing happens till you hit the send button paradigm". So beware of type in your passwords by accident. They read everything (and turn it to statistics).
This makes for an interesting way to sum up the internet into 26 words/phrases.
Check it out:
A - Amazon
B - Best Buy
C - CNN
D - Dictionary
E - eBay
F - FireFox
G - Games
H - Hotmail
I - Ikea
J - Jokes
K - Kazaa
L - Lyrics
M - Mapquest
N - News
O - Online Dictionary
P - Paris Hilton
Q - Quotes
R - Recipes
S - Spybot
T - Tara Reid
U - UPS
V - Verizon
W - Weather
X - XBox
Y - Yahoo
Z - Zip Codes
If I had to sum up the internet in 26 words/phrases, I don't think I could have done it better than Google. Of course, that is keeping in mind that Google Suggest has some pretty serious filters in place, so instead of P being "Porn" it is "Paris Hilton." Not too far off, if you think about it.
I agree with you in that JS menus aren't a very good idea. 10% of surfers have it turned off, and the menu is such a critical part of the site that you want it avaialable for everyone. That's why I also shake my head when I see Flash based menus.
However, there's no need for your solution of a <menu> tag since the <ul> tag and a little CSS already does that just fine.
Read the following articles to see what I mean:
Hope this is of use to you.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
Therefore, at present, this works only for English; with other languages it can happen that it suggests porn-prone search terms for the refinement of terms that have, as such, nothing to do with pornography. Some examples:
- the first suggestion for 'fille' (French for 'girl') is 'nue' (naked)
- the 5th suggestion for 'dzieci' (Polish for 'children') is 'nago' (naked)
- suggestions for 'mund' (German for 'mouth') countain 'mund auf sperma rein' (open mouth, introduce sperms), 'mund ficken' (fuck in the mouth), "mund arsch" (mouth ass)
- devochki (with Cyrillic letters: Russian for "little girls") gives the suggestions "devochki porno"
- the first suggestion for 'smot...' with Cyrillic letters (smotret': Russian for 'watch'/'look at') is "smotret' porno"
I think this is probably quite problematic - someone enters a search term that has nothing to do with pornography, and Google suggests something pornographic for 'refinement'. Of course, this is not due to Google's intent, but due to the distribution of the things people search for and of contents on the Internet. I suppose this is one of the problems Google will want to address before offering Suggest as an option on the main page.unfortunately, "google suggest" is not as good as it could be.
;). so i start by typing "sou". after a short delay, google suggests "southwest airlines". ok, this seems to be what most people are searching for when entering "sou". luckily, "southwest" is the second most common suggestion listed in the drop-down list, so i just hit 'cursor-down' and 'enter' to autocomplete and search for "southwest". everything ok so far.
;)
;)
;). sure, there are people who are interested in the set union and not the intersection.. all they need is hitting backspace accordingly.
why? valuable implicit information gained through the human-computer interaction is not fully exploited by "google suggest". for illustration, see the following example:
let's say i'm searching for "southwest". and for the sake of logic, let's assume that i either don't know the correct spelling or that i'm a lazy dog
now comes the problem:
the top result displayed by google is.. southwest airlines! this of course doesn't make sense because if i wanted to search for southwest airlines, i would have happily accepted google's first suggestion already. actually, "google suggest" knows about my preference for "southwest" over "southwest airlines" and yet doesn't use this "extra-"information gained thanks to human-computer interaction! so my brain feels slightly offended
to put it simply: if an average user is selecting a search term from a list of suggested search terms, he probably wants to search for that exact search term but not for any of the other also displayed suggested search terms. if not, an average user would have probably selected another search term out of the displayed list of suggestions. so to me, this looks like if the bright google guys forgot about the fact that the act of selection from a list also implicitly includes information about what does not get selected.
suggestion for a better "google suggest":
as a probably not perfect but working solution, "google suggest" could simply exploit this implicit user interaction information by excluding all explicitly deselected (and eventually all not explicitly selected) suggested search terms from the search query. in the example:
excluding all explicitly deselected search terms yields:
southwest -"southwest airlines" (voilà! southwest airlines is not the top result anymore
excluding all explicitly deselected and all not explicitly selected search terms:
southwest -"southwest airlines" -"soulseek" -"south park" (etc.. you get the point)
that's pretty easy to implement - with an obvious benefit for average users.
disclaimer: i'm talking about expectations of average users here. iow: about users that are probably just interested in the few topmost results, i.e. the intersection and not the set union of results (but that's probably the point of web searching anyway