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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."
Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes
I think what they meant to say there is that there was a group at Google that had nothing better to do than make this happen.
All that instant searching thing can be helpful at times, but it can also be wasteful of bandwidth, CPU resources, etc. The only place were I've found it essential is on youtube search on my bluray player where I don't have a keyboard to type letters, it can savea A LOT of time. Of course, I normally type 80 words a minute.
...it scared the hell out of our secretary about 10 minutes ago. "How does it know?!?" she said. I guess it found her city with just "city" in the box - pretty impressive, I thought.
Never underestimate the potential of Human stupidity. -Heinlein
Let's just pray Slashdot never instates a "post as you type" feature.
Have you ever used talk (old command line program)? Could you imagine if the comments section was some kind of massive talk system. I wouldn't be surprised if someone is reading this thread right now who will go off and try to make it happen. I guess Wave was kinda like that.
This is definitely useful for those who type slow, but its sort of startling for those of us who type faster. Thankfully it can be disabled: http://www.google.com/preferences?hl=en
Just tried it out and holy jeebus is it fast. My only qualm however is that, when I know what I'm looking for, it's a little distracting watching all of the results flash by as I type. Almost seizure inducing. It's very cool, but it would be nice if I could control the refresh rate with finer granularity.
On another note, a quick refresh rate can pull up some non-professional images if one isn't careful. For instance in typing latent dirichlet, 'la' pulled up a partially clothed/nude image of lady gaga.This might have been a bit awkward if safe-search wasn't on.
Oh yeah, amen brother. You know how many web pages now have images that are linked 1MB BMP files that could have been optimized down to 30k JPGs? Oh my god, and how many people now design sites assuming you've got a 1240 by 1024 monitor?
I still surf using a Pentium 3 and a CRT that doesn't support any more than 1024x768. Slowly but surely, I am being locked out of the web. I think it's high time to fire up the NeXT station, load up Omniweb and see what little still works.
What annoys me most is that the same kids making these enormous web errors tend to look at the internet mostly through their iPhones, and yet, they never "get" that there's a discrepancy. The current crop of 17yr olds is the stupidest generation since cavemen.
Oh yeah, and for the record... "Get off my lawn"
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Instant always has that - erm - processed taste.
Okay, what's different with this than having search results show up in the google bar on Firefox, IE or in my Android google widget?
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Is it just me, or was google instant available before the /. story about the google light-up-letters story even posted? :confused look:
Yes, it is surprisingly fast, and it is great for relieving boredom. For example, I started typing llll, lllll, llllll, lllllll, etc., to see how long a string of l's I could make before it said "Press enter to search" and stopped giving me results. It seems like I needed a string of about 30 L's. It looks like the cut-off is about 5,000 hits.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
Nice catch - just tested it. :P
Keep typing a normal query string - it will keep updating the page as you go, but then add "porn" at the end and all the results suddenly vanish! Even with safe-search Off!
Also, max string length = 100 chars, over 100 chars you need to press "Search", same as with "porn"
Talking about ad revenue, where do those suggestions come from? I typed "s" and the first three suggestions I got: skype, staples, sears. "e" - ebay, espn, expedia. "m" - myspace, mapquest, msn. Randomly tried typing two letters: "be" - best buy, bed bath and beyond, bevmo. etc.
Wouldn't some common word or a name of a pop star or whatever be the most likely thing people will search for rather than almost exclusively company names? Weird.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Ah, but I wasn't signed in =)
Does google roll out to some IP blocks early, as well? Or randomly to some "users" as marked by cookie signatures?
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
What fade? I see no fading at all. I see the search results constantly updating whenever I change the text in the search box, in real time, and it is absolutely badass. I'm a ghost-writer who gets paid to write uni papers, so this will increase my pay because of the smaller amount of time it will take to research a topic. i7 & 6GB of RAM, triple monitors, 50-100 tab browsing, searching multiple engines at once, research organization software/sidebar, and this feature == Less time to make x$, fitting more money into my workday. Thanks, Google.
Altavista is owned by Yahoo, who now get their search results from Bing. How about living a day without Microsoft instead?
(Note: I'm not getting Google Instant yet, just ye olde fashioned guess-ahead autocompletion.)
When this was first rumored, I warned that "child por(traits)" might be unsafe to search for with this system, since it might guess along the way that you were looking for something... you shouldn't. Apparently they anticipated this, because the several autocompletion possibilities they offer for "child po" disappear altogether when you change that to "child por" (including "child portraits", even though it still matches).
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I keep forgetting what I'm typing half way through when random pages start jumping out at me half way through.
Or.. you could go to translate.google.com where I had no fade-in? But yeah.. i guess that would make too much sense..
Indeed, and google suggest does the same thing, i.e. when autosuggesting, it refrains from suggestions that would return overwhelmingly adult content.