Google Instant Announced

GCPSoft writes with this quote from a Google announcement: "Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type."

Comments

You know what would make it instant?

[Gordonjcp]

Getting rid of that annoying fade-in effect.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Anonymous Coward]

They did that.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[TheGratefulNet]

if you don't move your mouse and just have focus there in the window, it never fades in. or something like that. there's a trick.

you shouldn't *need* any tricks; but this is the modern google. they 'went commercial' and so its not the same as the old google.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Garble Snarky]

Nobody cares about the resource usage. It is annoying to have to wait an extra second, or however long, before you can do what you're trying to do. Yes, one second is an incredibly negligible amount of time, but the fade provides literally zero benefit, for some people. Negligible amount of nuisance + zero benefit = net negative utility = bad idea.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[vux984]

Personally excessive fade effects annoy me because I spend a lot of time using tools like vnc, remote desktop, citrix ica clients, etc. Fades are generally slow, clumsy, and downright obnoxious when viewed remotely.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[CarpetShark]

30 seconds in, I found it MUCH better to just get rid of the whole thing:

http://www.google.com/preferences

Seriously... who made the decision to go with this? I suspect it's the same person that decided to ajaxify google images. Both are horrible, unusable things that just get in the way.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Ksevio]

Are you one of the people that signs the online petitions every time facebook changes too?

If you're going to the google homepage, most likely you want to just do a quick search, in which case, the fade in eliminates everything else in the page and makes it easy for your brain to instantly narrow in on the search bar.

Now I know you probably also visit google.com to view their privacy policy, but you can just bookmark that if it's so important.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[sakdoctor]

If I wanted my search engine to be stuffed full of shit, I would have used yahoo from the 90s, then migrated to bing.
Ever since google started messing up their front page by, you know, adding stuff, I started using the firefox search box. This had the side effect of diversifying the search tools I use, and about:blank really is the best homepage.

Now call me a conservative whiny techie, but never having to see obnoxious random "experiments", and logo doodles ever again is a huge step forward.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Cl1mh4224rd]

Ever since google started messing up their front page by, you know, adding stuff, I started using the firefox search box. This had the side effect of diversifying the search tools I use, and about:blank really is the best homepage.

Now call me a conservative whiny techie, but never having to see obnoxious random "experiments", and logo doodles ever again is a huge step forward.

Yikes. You know that the default Firefox homepage isn't www.google.com, right? It doesn't have those "obnoxious random 'experiments', and logo doodles".

So, yeah..."conservative whiny techie" might be the better label of multiple labels that pop into one's head after reading that comment of yours.

Yeah it's crap.

[commodore64_love]

This "constant updating of results as you type" makes my Hotel dialup connection run even MORE slowly than it did before.

Even on high-speed DSL, it slows things down. Why can't these web developers get into their heads that not everyone has a 1 megabit pipe? (Or if it is available, don't want to spend ~$60/month to get it.) I remember one of the things taught developed in the 90s and early 2000s was to "optimize" their pages to use as few kilobytes as possible - like squeezing GIFs down from 50 to 10KB. Apparently that paradigm got thrown out the window.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[BlueKitties]

First, it uses a small fraction of the bandwidth of a low quality video. It's only sending small amounts of text. Second, it automatically shuts off on low bandwidth accounts. Third, if it seriously slows down your computer, you probably have malware (probably the result of being asinine, your complaints seem to agree with this possibility.) Fourth, bloatware only applies to useless features. Try using it more than (oh... how long has this been out... two hours?) before blathering. Fifth, YOUR FACE. Sixth, YOUR MOM.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[Gruturo]

I was (and still am, to a degree) quite a rabid anti-bloat advocate. I cringe when I see 250k JPEGs used when a 25k PNG would have done better (esp. on non-photos, like comics, graphs, designs, maps) or when some idiot saves something at JPEG quality 100 when 95 would be indistinguishable to a human and yield a 60% space saving (btw, curse you Photoshop, and curse you Adobe, for Flash and your horrible PDF software (but not the PDF format!) while I'm at it).
I loved the Bandwidth Conservation Society website.
In 2003 I used to run some generated HTML through some old code beautifier which as a side effect auto-CSSized it yielding a decent space saving over raw, before serving it to browsers. And I'd still be doing it if I had to run a website, even if I was sure noone would notice the difference.

But I'd really have a hard time calling this new Google Instant thing a waste. It's a new gizmo which needs more bandwidth to perform a useful function. I'm not its target (I type *way* faster than their target audience, usually looking at neither the keyboard nor the screen until I press enter, and most my queries are through Firefox's search box since I just type Ctrl-K, searchtext, Enter, BAM, way too convenient (and works in Chrome as well) but I readily recognize it as useful to millions (maybe not those who just stare at their keyboard while they slowly hunt and peck, not even realizing their query / address was autocompleted 20 seconds ago, making me twitch at the sight of this daily absurdity. Never mind bookmarking the damn thing, or those newfangled RSS aggregators. Or the heresy of a keyboard binding :-) ).

Disclaimer: I'm totally a Google whore. Hey I even tried using Wave to do stuff. Once.

Re:It works for Google

[jonnythan]

If they did, at least all the "Candlejack will get y...... [no carrier]" or "I torrent all the time and the CIA has never knocked down my doo... [end of line]" posts would make *some* semse.

So stupid on so may ways

[devent]

First, what's the point to search on "L" "Li" "Lin" "Linu" "Linux" "Linux " "Linux U" "Linux US" "Linux USB"? Second, the whole page is moving and now I can't concentrate on a good search string. What do people with slow internet connections do? What do people with connections paid by traffic do, now they have to pay 10-100 times the traffic for no purpose or advantage.

Now I have to deactivate JS on google, thank you very much.

Re:So stupid on so may ways

[BlueKitties]

You didn't even read the announcement. It doesn't do a search for "L" "Li" ...etc, it predicts what you're going to type and gives you results for that. For example, try typing "weather" and you'll see weather results before you're done typing. Follow up with "weather for "... and a nearby city, you'll see results for that city. Also, it's sending small amounts of text. Video eats up hundreds of times more bandwidth.

Re:No IE6 support

[amicusNYCL]

Google has locked out thousands of businesses that have never upgraded browsers.

I tend to see it has thousands of businesses denying themselves access to services because they aren't willing to upgrade. It's not Google's fault that businesses refuse to upgrade. They're going to be left behind, end of story. I stopped testing on IE6 a long time ago. People need to move on and upgrade if they expect to use all of the features of the internet, that's just a simple fact. You can't expect all of the newest technologies like CSS3 and canvas to work in IE6, it's just not going to happen, ever.

Re:Wasteful requests.

[nazsco]

yeah, it took 2.5sec to unfreeze the page while it was loading on my crappy firefox.

anyone here still uses the google front page to search?

i mean, browser has a keyboard accesible, always-there, box for search.

Ad revenue driver?

[robot256]

Is this supposed to drive up ad revenue? Do they get the same kickback for a 300ms view as a 3.0s view?

Re:It's live now, and

[Locke2005]

"Who knows what evil lurks in the hears of men? The Google knows!"

Re:Wasteful requests.

[cgenman]

The question is what do you have more of: Bandwidth and CPU, or time?

A lot of the time I don't know quite what search phrase I should use to get something that I'm looking for. The ability to start typing, maybe get what I'm looking for in the second word, maybe the forth, or maybe go back and edit the search, is nice. When running a single search for something known, it's slightly faster but mostly fluffy. But when you're really looking for something, it can be quite helpful.

Re:No IE6 support

[Ksevio]

It doesn't have official Opera support either, though if you identify as firefox then it'll turn on and work fine.