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?

[DeadDecoy]

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.

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?

[orangesquid]

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.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Atzanteol]

Man is Slashdot the largest collection of conservative whiny techies in the world or is it just me? Perhaps if that fade-in is so resource intensive you may want to change from your C=64 with coupled modem to something a bit more recent? I know I know, all that extra memory and CPU speed just encourages "sloppy programming" but trust me it's worth it.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[BarryJacobsen]

Is it just me, or was google instant available before the /. story about the google light-up-letters story even posted?

Google rolls features out early to random people for testing.

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?

[nacturation]

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.

Searching for vagrants or penal colonies is definitely not recommended at work.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[LBArrettAnderson]

I got up to 100 Ls before it stopped (exactly 100, so I imagine 100 is the character limit). Some of them had ~3,000 results.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[mpeskett]

One second * number of times I will ever have to wait for the thing to finish fading

Why... it could be as much as a dozen seconds across my lifespan

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Mitchell314]

Or (perhaps more likely) assessments.

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?

[LordArgon]

A second is NOT negligible. Google's touting that Google Instant saves 2-5 seconds per search, so obviously they care about delays at that grain. Adding a fade-in works against being fast and efficient.

The point seems moot, however, as Google no longer fades in (at least for me - yay!).

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Yvan256]

They did not.

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?

[orangesquid]

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?

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Albanach]

But you can search before the fade in. The cursor is already in the box. Just type and hit enter.

The whole point of the fade in is to make sure there's no garbage coming between you and Google's main objective, search.

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?

[drinkypoo]

The fades make it take longer to see what you're looking at. You should be able to disable all eye candy so that if you find it makes you less productive you're not just stuck with it.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[BarryJacobsen]

I don't believe Google has officially announced how they are selected, my guess would be that it is a mixture of both.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[insufflate10mg]

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.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[gmuslera]

The CPU that always matters is on the other side of the keyboard. Flashy shiny things that distracts you and sometimes make you forget or change your mind on what you are searching for sometimes are harmful. Being able to opt out of that feature, in the other hand, is a positive thing.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[JamesP]

Reminds me of that story about the retired englishmen doing his crosswords and then looking up on google '*non-domesticated* Asian *donkey*' (you can do the math replacing the ** words by equivalents)

Yes, he was really scared

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Yvan256]

What do you mean "Instant"?

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Yvan256]

If by "Instant" you mean that get-results-as-you-type feature, it's on www.google.com, which is the regular Google.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[lgw]

Really, how many minues of work would it take for Google to offer a classic.google.com search page with none of the bullshit?

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[thetoadwarrior]

Then just disable it.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[tverbeek]

(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).

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[tverbeek]

The C64 didn't use an acoustically-coupled modem; it used a 300baud handset replacement that plugged into a port on the computer and connected directly to the base of a desk or wall phone.</pedant>

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Sir_Lewk]

Yes. The current www.google.com has the instant feature, and has disabled fade in. Not sure why there should be much misunderstanding by what he means by "instant" since this is what the entire fucking article is about...

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[ozric99]

How about www.google.com/m/classic ?

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Yvan256]

If I go on www.google.com I have both the instant feature AND that annoying fade in.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Didorian]

Yeah man, I loved Google too before they went mainstream.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[decipher_saint]

I don't know about you but I use Google as a tool, when they change the tool (especially one that works so well) it is disorienting.

I've noticed that over the last couple of years Google has been trying to slide in several features for no apparent reason. I don't know why they felt it necessary to add fade-in on configuration options, background images on their main page or endlessly scrolling image results with a scripted zoom effect on mouseover but they seem compelled to tamper with the GUI for no good reason.

I am beginning to resent Google because of all this unwanted jiggery-pokery, not so much because of wild changes that happen with little to no warning but more because the changes they make seem trivial at best and annoying at worst.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or.. you could go to translate.google.com where I had no fade-in? But yeah.. i guess that would make too much sense..

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[badboy_tw2002]

ok, I will. Ahem, "conservative whiny techy"

If you're that particular about your homepage, why not just craft one locally that comes up when you first start your browser, or one you can link to instead of google? Then it can forward the info onto the search box.

Also who goes to the front page to do a search? The only time I really ever visit it is when I hear about the doodles or whatever. Just use the search bar in the browser!

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Dishevel]

Adding a fade-in works against being fast and efficient.

No it dose not. Google page loads. I type and hit enter. I see results. No delay.
If I want to clinck on one of those links at the top. I move my mouse and when I get to the links there they are. I click and I go.
No Delay.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[thrift24]

Typing "I can" results in a pretty offensive word for the top result on my machine.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Defenestrar]

My office mate and I have had separate Google site implementations before. Our IP is usually within about 5 of each other. We were both logged out at the time.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Dishevel]

It is a testament to Google that the things that you about Google are so trivial.
Any other search engine and your resentments would have a bit more weight.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[causality]

Yes. That horrible fade-in, and all the other recent horrible 'enhancements' should be removed.

As a NoScript user who has not added "google.com" to the block list, my first knowledge of this new feature was the Slashdot article. As a bonus, any search result links I click are direct links that do not go through any of Google's redirectors.

The Web, thankfully, is not a passive affair like television. It's like a mutual agreement between what the server offers and what the client decides to render. This is to your advantage. You can take control of how you experience it. It takes only a token effort and I've never regretted doing so.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[whoop]

but the fade provides literally zero benefit, for some people

I notice you use "some" in that quote. So, I presume you do so because it is fewer than half the total population that is using Google. I'd wager the vast majority (70% or more?) of users don't care that passionately about it. So, you want this feature, which most users are fine with, to go away for everybody? Something seems a bit off there, but I wish you good luck in your journeys.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Abstrackt]

Searching for vagrants or penal colonies is definitely not recommended at work.

I can see the issue with searching for "vagrants" but I never got any bad results for "Australia".

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Locutus]

they also have a multi-billion dollar monopoly spending billions and using their classic dirty tricks to try and kill Google. So, todays Google can't be the same Google as yesterdays. Because Microsoft does not rest until it has at least won some control of the competitors market and Microsoft is not going away anytime soon, we will continue to see Google running around trying to change things and keep the pot stirred.

Remember, Microsoft has marketing telling people that search links are bad( "those LINKS!" ) and guess what, people aren't too smart so they believe that marketing. Didn't you know that pretty background pictures on your search pages were more important than the links related to your search?

"modern Google", I just hope they don't do what many companies in Microsoft's cross-hairs have done and that's start stepping on their own toes trying to out maneuver Microsoft's inferior product but superior marketing.

LoB

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[jakhrat]

Is it available in Braille?

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[sexconker]

Sucks for anyone living in or going to Pennsylvania.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[InfiniteWisdom]

Personally excessive fade effects annoy me because I spend a lot of time using tools like vnc, remote desktop, citrix ica clients, etc.

I'm curious about why you do that on a regular basis. I used to ssh to my machine at home to access stuff, but ultimately found it more efficient to move my e-mail over to an IMAP server, install a firefox plugin that syncs bookmarks, and sftp or sshfs when I need to access files. The only time I really need to access stuff through a remote desktop is to do admin tasks on a windows machine.

So I'm wondering what your use case is.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[517714]

I do not want Google's adwords buyers showing up - A = Amazon, B = Best Buy, etc. No matter how hard one may attempt to ignore the dross, it will have some affect. Thank goodness preferences can turn it off.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[sexconker]

You don't need to "tab right in", the cursor's focus automatically goes to the search box. That was the whole point. Keyboard-only users don't have the crap fade in; they can just type a search query. What is the matter with you people? Any UI change at all, in any application or website, gets nothing but complaints from Slashdot. I defy you to find one counterexample.

Read what you're responding to, and think.
Javascript focusing does not work with many screen reading programs, nor should they.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Sir_Lewk]

Odd, might be regional then. In the Harrisburg PA area I don't get the fade-in.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Yvan256]

Yes you're right, I see real-time suggestions, not real time searching. I guess I'm not fully awake yet.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[daveime]

Jesus Christ, then he'd have to move his mouse all the way to his bookmarks toolbar and click something !!!

HE DOESN'T HAVE TIME FOR ALL THAT SHIT !!!

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[melted]

Give it some time. You won't want to disable it if you stick with it for a few days.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[CarpetShark]

Give it some time. You won't want to disable it if you stick with it for a few days.

Of course not. I'll have blown a hole in my skull by then ;)

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[jaymzter]

Try a link that gives you the old Google interface, with no fade-in or features:

http://www.google.com/custom?hl=en&client=google-coop-np

If I need features, I just click on the Google image to get to the newer interface.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[martin-boundary]

But you can search before the fade in. The cursor is already in the box. Just type and hit enter.

People don't operate like that. We're distracted by eye candy, it's evolutionary conditioning (if it moves, it could be a predator etc).

What actually happens is that the fade in attracts the user's attention for the time it takes to fade, and only then does the brain kick in to go type some text.

Sure, some people can train themselves to ignore the fade and type text straight away, but it's unnatural, and the majority of people will just wait the extra second. And because that extra second is always there, it feels like a waste of time.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[LordArgon]

Well I feel held up and annoyed by the fade-in. It might just be a mental block that prevents me from processing the page without it loading or I might just be hyper-sensitive to any kind of delay.

Either way, I stand by my assertion that adding fade-in works against being fast and efficient. That statement can be objectively true and also not impact everybody. For example, if you have a script that simulates mouse clicks and have to introduce a delay because of the fade in, the fade in has impacted the speed of your script.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[melted]

Maybe. Or maybe you will discover, like I did, that something is "wrong" if this feature is disabled. I didn't like it at first either. It seemed too jarring.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[CarpetShark]

Fair enough, but personally, between discovering something is missing in a search engine and blowing my own brains out to get away from said search engine, I'd rather not risk it ;)

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[brusk]

It's all been downhill since they left stanford.edu

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.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Dishevel]

Nice reach!
But....No.
It is not slower. It is ok. I am wrong sometimes as well. Just admit you fucked up and move one with your life. This is how we learn, grow and become better people.
Do not rob yourself of this learning opportunity.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[LordArgon]

Proof by "you're wrong" is never very convincing... If you'd instead like to address my point, feel free.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Rich0]

Suppose you're using a computer that you aren't supposed to install software on. NXClient on a USB stick is all you need to access everything you want. Or, you can set up all kinds of ssh tunnels and client software, and try to keep that all up-to-date using zero-footprint USB editions.

Neatx works just fine for remote access - except when programmers go crazy with effects. I have no idea why a recent thunderbird upgrade causes it to completely refresh the window about 10 times every time I click on a message, but it drives me nuts.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Garble Snarky]

But... that's still more than zero..? So, whatever your reaction to my original point, that point still stands.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[vux984]

I'm curious about why you do that on a regular basis.

Remote support / administration of a variety of servers and virtual servers for a variety of clients is the primary use.
I'm also occasionally called on to do remote support for end user systems. - fades are BIG annoyance here, as they'll have god-knows-what installed and running.
I also occasionally need to remotely access my personal desktops from my laptop. - fades are an annoyance here too.
I also need to use a couple bandwidth heavy client-server applications, which are made available to remote users via Citrix. Installing them on my laptop or even my desktop is not a viable option (licensing reasons, -and- network performance reasons). My office is not where the database servers are. fades are an big annoyance here too.

Fades on consumer targeted apps are annoying... but I can't believe they are starting to show up in server admin tools as well. WTF?! Splash screens that fade in and out, screen transitions... its demented. And that goes for websites distributing things like server patches and updates etc. For example, if I remote into an administration VM to download a patch for a server on the same LAN the last thing I need is to navigate through a freaking animated glitzy web 2.0 website to get to the download package. (I'd download it to my local PC and then upload it, but would take far longer if its a large download.)

On that note... driver websites should take that hint to. If I'm stuck in 800x600 16-colour VGA I really don't want to navigate a high-res high-color flash loaded javascript animated website to get the chipset and video drivers.

but ultimately found it more efficient to move my e-mail over to an IMAP server

I have had nothing but miserable experiences with IMAP. I find them slow. And they always seem to fail cryptically. I'll be copying a folder, and get a 'syntax error' or 'unknown error -50' or some other nonsense, and have it just abort, and then nothing works until I quit and restart my mail client. And then I have to clean up the mess left behind. I've also had miserable luck with imap clients. With Entourage 2004 Mac it's nothing buck suck, ditto for Outlook XP (2002). I use Thunderbird as my primary email client, and to be honest I haven't tried IMAP for a long time with it. To be fair my experience with IMAP and Outlook 2010 has been limited but so far quite positive... so maybe its time to try it again.

install a firefox plugin that syncs bookmarks

I'd be more interested in syncing the smart-bar/history/saved form fields than the bookmarks, and I'm reluctant to become dependant on a 3rd party service provider (especially google) to hold my data, as I object to having my data harvested by them more than is already happening.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Garble Snarky]

To be honest, the fade effect would bother me if I ever used the Google homepage - this is why I have thought out an argument against it. But I never use the Google homepage, so I don't really care. It seems to me that leaving it on by default, but giving the option to disable, would be a decent solution.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Garble Snarky]

And, by "some", I meant "more than none, and less than all". I assume this is what most other people mean when they use the word.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[vux984]

Sure I'll just type that in... :rolls eyes:

Then again, with respect to google at least I mostly just use the search field in my menu bar anyway; so I don't spend a lot of time at the home page unless I'm on a PC with an old version of IE.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Dishevel]

I tried to be nice but ok.
You brought up 4 examples.
1. Feeling held up is not being held up.
2. Mental Blocks are your problem. Not a speed issue.
3. Hypersensitivity to a delay that is not actually there is still not slowing down the search.
4. This is where I complimented you on your reach. Grasping at straws to make the way you feel about something seem more logical is a reach and you have to know this.
There. Now your points have been addressed. Feel better?

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[InfiniteWisdom]

I use thunderbird with IMAP and it works fine, so it might be time to give it another shot. The server side software does matter though... I used to have my mail on Godaddy's e-mail service and that sucked. For instance, if you tried to move more than 500 e-mails at once it would crap out (for example if you're reorganizing stuff and want to move stuff over somewhere)

I now run my own dovecot server and it works great.

install a firefox plugin that syncs bookmarks

I'd be more interested in syncing the smart-bar/history/saved form fields than the bookmarks,

Check out Firefox sync. It syncs everything, bookmarks/smart-bar/history/saved passwords etc. You can even see "tabs from other computers" in the history menu which is pretty handy. It does store stuff on Mozilla's servers but it encrypts it locally before uploading it. I also believe (but I'm not 100% certain) you have the option to use your own server

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/sync/

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[zuperduperman]

> giving the option to disable, would be a decent solution.

Not really, because presumably it relies on you being logged in or at least maintaining a persistent cookie from Google. So it won't work the minute I search from another computer or device and it also prevents me blocking cookies from google.com which means I can't secure my privacy from being tracked by them and also have my preference saved at the same time (perhaps I can with a sophisticated enough cookie blocker, but I think most are just all or nothing).

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[LordArgon]

I tried to be nice but ok.

In my opinion, this reply was much nicER (minus the fruitless taunting about the apparently-poor choice of the word "feel").

1. Feeling held up is not being held up.
2. Mental Blocks are your problem. Not a speed issue.

Actually, it is being held up and it is a speed issue. Assuming a mental block, the fade in activates the mental block and I wait for it to complete, thereby being delayed by the combination of their site design and my defective brain.

This next part is hearsay, but I believe Google has copyright text at the bottom of the home page simply as a visual cue that the page is loaded. The tale I heard goes that when they were user testing the original home page, people sat there waiting for it to load because they didn't realize it had finished; the text at the bottom gave them an unconscious signal it was done. My point is that visual cues are critical to UI design and you have to factor in subconscious activity to achieve your desired effects.

This is all assuming a mental block is even the issue. I brought up the mental block because it's a possibility and would make my frustration at least partially my fault, but it does not invalidate my point that including fade in fights speed and efficiency. What's the other option? Not fading in, which is maximally fast for everybody (including brain-damaged me). By definition, the fade-in has created a situation that is not as fast as it could be.

That said, I know I'm not alone in this. The post I replied to by Garble Snarky expressed the same sort of displeasure with the fade in. That doesn't make me right, but it shows that other people seem to have the same perspective. Perhaps this is evidence that I'm not as unreasonable as you seem to believe.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Animaether]

That fade-in effect is just for their additional services. The main search field was always immediately visible. I didn't see the problem months ago (see other comment thread on this very thing), I still don't see it now.

That said.. maybe they heard you and others.. www.google.com no longer fades anything in. www.google.nl still does.
I don't care either way as I use the search box in the browser and can refine on the results page if I need to.. I practically never see the main google webpage.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[RobertLTux]

dunno about you but 95% of my searches on Google are done via the FF searchbar

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[nacturation]

Reminds me of that story about the retired englishmen doing his crosswords and then looking up on google '*non-domesticated* Asian *donkey*' (you can do the math replacing the ** words by equivalents)

Ah yes... feral asian equidae.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Eivind]

Indeed, and google suggest does the same thing, i.e. when autosuggesting, it refrains from suggestions that would return overwhelmingly adult content.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[invalid_user]

Of course not. I'll have blown a hole in my skull by then ;)

<pedant>If bullets go through a head that hard.</pedant>

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[js_sebastian]

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.

Honestly, I am even more of a conservative whiny techie, cause I have noscript enabled and google is not whitelisted, except when I'm using maps, which is not so often since the city I live in (vienna) has an excellent local mapping service. So I never notice any of this stuff, and only find out about it when it gets to slashdot or to the news... And for the big-brother-paranoid among you, if you use google with scripts enabled, google can keep track of what links you clicked on in the search results.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[BenoitRen]

I have an even better trick to avoid the new lay-out fluff: having a non-standard user agent string. Yes, even Google uses retarded browser sniffing.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[tehcyder]

You certainly rebutted the "conservative whiny techies" jibe pretty conclusively there!

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[hack slash]

I only ever see the annoying fade-in effect when I use other people's machines, because years ago I made my own homepage.html which has a bunch of highly used links and search boxes from the major sites I use (google,ebay,imdb,archive.org etc.) so I truly get an instant search page appearing when I open up a new browser window or tab and click Home or press Alt+Home.

Plus extracting the html search code means you just get the plain search box with no other realtime-results bandwidth wasting cpu eating bullshit. I type much faster than the average web user so when I'm searching for something I don't need the results trying to appear as I type, because I type faster than the results can appear.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Control-Z]

Agreed. What I did was find an old copy of the Google search page from early 2010 and use a local copy of it as my default home page. You can actually type your search with no crap happening all over the screen to entertain you.

Actually most of my searches are done from the browser URL/search bar anyway, so what Google does with their home page isn't a big deal any more.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[smi.james.th]

TFA said they're rolling it out over the next several days to people with google accounts. I don't have it either, yet.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[mpeskett]

I was serious with the first line, not so much with the second. It annoys the piss out of me on the occasions when I do have to wait for it to finish fading. Honestly, I was mocking myself more than you with the dozen seconds bit; I care about those dozen seconds even while acknowledging that they're trivial.

There may not be many times when I have to wait, it probably won't add up to much total time, but every second of it feels so damnably unnecessary. Much like any time spent being distracted by the flickering "instant" results feels highly unnecessary.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[BrokenHalo]

I'm not a NoScript user, but I do have an extensive /etc/hosts file and Adblock, and I don't seem to make this feature work at all. I guess I could try disabling one or the other, but I suspect I'm not missing much.

However, the autocompletion thingy under the search box can provide hours of mindless entertainment, like this one I found just now: "I'm b" -> "I'm being eaten by a boa constrictor". Until a few weeks ago "I like to" used to give something like "I like to tape my thumbs to my palms to see what it would be like to be a dinosaur", but that doesn't seem to work any more...

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[BrokenHalo]

An even easier trick is to simply skip to their Advanced Search page. How you choose to do so is up to you - my solution is a simple local homepage with a table of commonly visited URLs with corresponding icons, but that's just how I like to work.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[BrokenHalo]

Assuming the feature comes my way (which it hasn't yet), I wonder if it will cope with text-mode browsers such as Lynx or Links...

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[BrokenHalo]

... but most people don't carry their bookmarks in their pocket.

There was a time when I used to do exactly that. But although my bookmarks file is now several MB in size, having added to it since the early '90s, I could (and soon probably will) just get rid of it, since I usually just google everything other than a couple of dozen URLs anyway.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[Jurily]

You know, the thing mentioned in the title, the summary, and TFA?

It works for Google

[Drakkenmensch]

Let's just pray Slashdot never instates a "post as you type" feature.

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.

Re:It works for Google

[suso]

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.

Re:It works for Google

[samkass]

Let's just pray Slashdot never instates a "post as you type" feature.

Wasn't that Google Wave? And haven't they added that feature to Google Docs?

Re:It works for Google

[eln]

Maybe they were dictating...

Re:It works for Google

[AndrewNeo]

Unfortunately it wouldn't help anyone fix their spelling mistakes.

Re:It works for Google

[g3k0]

Unfortunately it wouldn't help anyone fix their spelling mistakes.

Nor would it help anyone fix his or her grammatical mistakes!

Re:It works for Google

[mpeskett]

Have you ever used talk (old command line program)? Could you imagine if the comments section was some kind of massive talk system.

Given that my answer to the first of those is no, I'm going to have trouble with the second one unless you elaborate a little.

Or I suppose I could go Google it, but what am I? An animal? Googling my own information... to hell with that.

Re:It works for Google

[Yvan256]

Dear Aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all.

Re:It works for Google

[vadim_t]

It's an old realtime chat system. Screen is split in two, half for your text, half for the other side's, and anything you type gets sent and displayed at the destination immediately.

So they get to see your typing speed, typos, how you type half a sentence and then change your mind, etc.

In my experience, some interesting things arise from it. For instance you see how and where people have to think while writing a reply, replies that start rather tactless and get corrected, etc. Some people will also start doing things like going "Hmm..." and periodically adding a "." to show that they're still there. Conversations also go more like RL ones, in that since you see typing in real time, sometimes you see somebody typing the reply to a question you were about to ask, and erase the question, or start replying as soon as you have enough to reply to.

Re:It works for Google

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Let's just pray Slashdot never instates a "post as you type" feature.

No kiddin. Even the 20 second delay doesn't rid us of the knee-jerk posts. What Slashdot needs is a "post after you think" feature.

Re:It works for Google

[tverbeek]

Especially with Slashdot's no-edit, no-delete policy on posted comments. It would effectively disable the Backspace key.

Re:It works for Google

[Rhaban]

that would be google wave

Re:It works for Google

[Chyeld]

The best part was when your/their terminal emulator didn't understand the backspace key and every typo was followed by a string of "^h"s as they attempted to correct it.

This is fummy ^H^H^H^Hnny

Re:It works for Google

[D H NG]

No, that would be Google Scribe.

Re:It works for Google

[KamuZ]

Maybe add some Google Scribe to the edit box? :)

Re:It works for Google

[YourExperiment]

That would be called Google Wave.

Wasteful requests.

[suso]

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.

Re:Wasteful requests.

[falsified]

Seriously? It's one of the first questions answered in the FAQ.

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.

Re:Wasteful requests.

[Patoski]

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

The secure version still uses the more traditional approach if the new feature makes your machine cough and wheeze.

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:Wasteful requests.

[IANAAC]

Or s/he could just read the flippin' search page. It's right there at the top of the page.

Re:Wasteful requests.

[Mitchell314]

If in doubt, fix the settings in your account.

Re:Wasteful requests.

[TubeSteak]

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

Optimize Google: htt://www.optimizegoogle.com

I'm sure this will be updated in the near future to let you perm-ban their Instant 'feature'

Re:Wasteful requests.

[bhartman34]

I'm not sure it's "essential" anywhere, but it's certainly helpful. If your result link can be found in a couple of keystrokes, that's a lot better than having to type a full phrase and click "Enter", or having to scroll down to the suggesting you want and click "Enter", isn't it? Sure, it sounds minor, but it can add up.

Re:Wasteful requests.

[daveime]

MY key technical insights ...

1. Most people go to Google already knowing what they are going to search for, and that flashing up partially matching results that have no bearing on what you are looking for will only distract you, causing you to type slower as you try to read faster.

2. Perhaps this is saving time, but it sure as hell won't save any energy, as they'll be starting search queries over multiple servers for things you weren't even looking for, and presumably leaving them to timeout the millisecond you type the next letter.

3. Contrary to all the other whiners here on /. I find the faded links and instant focus on the search textbox the most effective thing Google have done in years ...

Re:Wasteful requests.

[daveime]

I'm sure this will be updated in the near future to use a REAL transport protocol.

FTFY

Re:Wasteful requests.

[Soul-Burn666]

I hardly ever surf to the Google website, 99% of my searches go through a search keyword in the awesome-bar (in FF).
I just type "g something I want to search" and it opens.
I also have "img" for images, "vid" for video and "gg" for I'm feeling lucky.
No need for search bars/boxes/sites.

Re:Wasteful requests.

[brusk]

Thanks! I always wanted to know how to otimize Google.

Re:Wasteful requests.

[epine]

Perhaps this is saving time, but it sure as hell won't save any energy, as they'll be starting search queries over multiple servers for things you weren't even looking for, and presumably leaving them to timeout the millisecond you type the next letter.

My technical insight is that you won't ever work for Google. You just failed the admission quiz.

Let's suppose Google has 500,000 servers with 1GB SRAM each. That's 0.5 petabytes of online SRAM. A single search result can be coded as a 64-bit integer or less (if such a big index scales, but they're clever, and I bet they figured it out). Maybe 100 bytes for the top ten results for a given search prefix. The top million search terms that represent 90-99% of delivered results can be cached in SRAM entirely prebuilt.

Beyond these, the top 100 million individual search results can be cached in SRAM in pre-rendered fragments (but the page as a whole must combine several of these, likely involving several machines).

We're now at 99.9% of delivered results and have yet to request a disk seek. 0.1% of Google search traffic is a non-trivial deluge. I'm sure Google works the problem all the way down. They're working within a tight budget of 4 trillion disk seeks per day to handle the last 0.1% (500,000 servers with 10ms average seek time--unless they're fond of SSD).

I could continue, but we're already past the point of marginal return on spelling out the obvious.

Yes, as I'm sure someone will point out, even radix-sort by network router across a clever cache hierarchy doesn't come for free.

On the flip side, the "instant" result set will tend to direct people into the cheap prebuilt portion of the mass-appeal search query tree. Plus there is the number of times they manage to distract the user who was about to type a highly focused search query (hence unique and expensive to construct) in favour of meandering around in a superficial result set because it seems easier to click through the wrong pile of laundry than continue typing three words. People are like that.

My analysis is that any technology which encourages the user population to be creatures of habit (and popularity) will tend to decrease energy cost to Google by enhancing cache effectiveness, if they properly design their back-end to anticipate this.

I could be wrong, but the argument can't be dismissed without spoiling some beer coasters.

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.

[tekrat]

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"

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[TyFoN]

They have an "off switch" if you don't want to use it ;)

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.

[CannonballHead]

So ... turn it off? If there was no way to turn it off, you'd have a pretty good point... but Google seems to do ok with the allow-people-to-turn-it-off stuff...

For people who DO have a a relatively good connection, it's nice.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[BlueKitties]

8 "kilobits" per second is still "1,000 bytes/characters per second." Even if 100 characters are dedicated to IP/Port information or something of the sorts, that's leaving 900 unique characters for results information. I highly doubt DSL is being slowed down by this sort of connection, which means you're probably just full of bologna.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[hairyfeet]

I'm typing this on a 1.8GHz Sempron and I feel your pain. I mean WTF web designers? Huge 1Mb+ images, pages splattered with a tiny bit of text and taking 20 pages to put two paragraphs worth of text, having to use Adblock Plus just to keep from being driven batshit by all the damned seizure inducing bandwidth sucking ads, its like the whole web is being designed by colorblind teens on crack!

As for TFA, man that is irritating. Having to work on boxes all day if I had to deal with that constant flipping I'd go nuts. I think I'll just start switching all new builds to Yahoo Search and if they want Google they can switch it back. I'm certainly not logging into my Google account on every PC I work on or having to go into a cookie based preference just to look up a driver, no thanks Google.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[Score Whore]

Do you actually give a crap about your karma? I mean my entire oeuvre was to game the system and I don't even give a crap about it.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[Itninja]

That type of thing is exactly what the Firefox+NoScript combo is for. There is nothing (at least nothing I find useful) on Google that really requires scripts of any kind; especially this 'Instant' thing.

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:Yeah it's crap.

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Repeat that while logged in, so I can damage your karma the same way you damaged mine.

Do you mean by making you look like an idiot so people modded you down? Or are you presuming they moderated your post?

And there's no way to turn-off the annoying "popup" images that Google now uses during Image searches.

At the bottom of the image search page is a link "Switch to basic version". You're on Slashdot, figure it out from there.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[commodore64_love]

>>>8 "kilobits" per second

Where did you get that number?
.

>>>that's leaving 900 unique characters for results information.

Double that and make it an even 2000 characters/second, because of HTML formatting. A dialup line streams only 5000 characters per second (not including v.92 compression). Can you see now why constant webpage updates would have a negative impact? Oh and you're right the DSL slowdown is not significant but I can still see it.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[Artifex33]

Agreed. I pray they don't force-feed this to my iPhone.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[cgenman]

Not to be smarmy, but 1 megabit is pretty slow. In my area, most network providers start at 3 mb and go up to 20.

I don't know. The prior ethos was "Make it great for most users, and make it work for the rest." Here, you have an improved experience for the majority of users, who are on a real pipe. And you have an easy and obvious option to turn it off, for the few people still on dial-up. Seems reasonable.

Also, doesn't nearly every browser out there search VIA the URL field?

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[KingAlanI]

the reminder of the ctrl+k hotkey earns you a virtual +1 Informative. :)

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[Myopic]

Yes. It got thrown out the window as it became less important to to easing of technical constraints.

We no longer write applications in 3k of space, and we no longer make 3k webpages. Get used to it, it ain't gonna change.

If you don't want to use larger programs or larger webpages, then you will be constrained in your options, and left behind by the state of the art. That's a perfectly fine personal decision, but I and people who think like me completely reject your suggestion that there is something wrong with the situation.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[RoFLKOPTr]

P.S.

I also hate their new Image search page which, instead of just displaying image, runs some CPU intensive script that expands/shrinks images as you pass over them. What used to be a fast, pleasant browse is now like walking through molasses. It's so annoying that I'm trying to figure out how to turn if off and go back to the "old" plain images without any kind of Java enhancement.

CPU-intensive? Perhaps you should upgrade from your Commodore 64 to a computer manufactured in the last 5 years. My dad's crappy 6-year-old work laptop handles the new Google just fine, and my gaming machine doesn't even notice the difference.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[PagosaSam]

750K for $35. Move out of the city and price goes way up. sigh.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[StikyPad]

usually looking at neither the keyboard nor the screen until I press enter

Not looking at the keyboard is one thing, but not looking at the screen?? Please stop computing while driving.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[DIplomatic]

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.

The paradigm of catering to the slowest and oldest has been replaced by pioneering new ground while at the same time including easy ways to turn off the extra features. If you would calm down for five seconds maybe you would see the link "Instant Search is On" with a dropdown menu to turn it off.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[froggymana]

It could be a lot worse... imagine if it were written in Flash. It doesn't seem too bad, but could use improvement or the ability to easily turn it off. Right now I look at it being some fancy new eye candy that google released for searching.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[tater86]

If you can't afford $50 a month for internet, you don't sound like a very good target for advertising. If you aren't a good target for advertising, why should google care how your experience is?

Maybe you should look at the higher requirements as a way of weeding out undesirables.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[Gruturo]

Not looking at the keyboard is one thing, but not looking at the screen?? Please stop computing while driving.

My office is in a 15th century building and there's a lovely court with a big (big!) fountain right out of my window, with a bit of sky also in view.

(before you ask for my geek card back: ok, the other reason I'm not looking at the screen while googling is that I have 2 screens and I'm often looking at the other one, typically containing the context I wanted to google about :) But the 15th century building thing is also true, lucky me, previous job was in a basement (although I loved it!))

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[BlueKitties]

You're suggesting world class Engineers just happened to overlook redundant HTML formatting data? No, they didn't. Check your bandwidth usage (seriously, watch your network usage as you're typing for results. It's very small.) For that matter it's not even a constant stream, it only needs to send data about your current query/suggestions until a new auto-complete becomes dominate, then it sends a small package of new results to replace old results. Case-in-point: notice your network usage bar only has a few blips as you type.

Further, the typing box and results screen are being handled in parallel; At worst your "slow down" is on the instant results, so if you aren't concerned with the instant results, there should be no problem. If you're still having a slow down, it's probably not due to your Internet connection, it's probably due to a crappy computer (hell, most Cell Phones can keep up with this sort of work load.) This is BY NO MEANS high resource usage.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[LanMan04]

Do you still code in Assembler? No, you code in Java or something else that's high-level, unless you have very specific needs (embedded systems, etc). But what about those poor people with 286 processors?

QQ

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[BlueKitties]

Oh, and I used 8kbits as an example because A) I had an AOL dialup with 56kbits, and B) it's an easy to work with number because 1Byte==8Bits.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[daveime]

Yes

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[woddfellow2]

Why can't these web developers get into their heads that not everyone has a 1 megabit pipe?

...or a dual-core processor? I am stuck with a box with a 1.15 GHz single-core, 32-bit AMD Athlon and 512 MB RAM. Also, it has choked on the recent interactive Google logos, which if I remember correctly, at one point even caused my browser to freeze!

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[assassinator42]

I'm using a netbook with a 1024x600 screen and Firefox with bookmark toolbar enabled. I don't feel like I'm being "locked out of the web". And Slashdot with scripting enabled is definitely in the running for the slowest site I visit.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[lwsimon]

Serious, professional web developers take this into account. While I've not done it for pay in a few years, I coded all my templates by hand, and tested in order of complexity, starting with Lynx. After a while, you begin to visualize what HTML looks like without bothering with the browser.

The problem is, big companies tend to take internal programmers and make them "web developers", instead of hiring outside experts that actually understand and can implement the standards.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[BenoitRen]

No, it's what YesScript is for. That one uses a blacklist instead of a whitelist, which is more usable.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[Itninja]

The blacklist model requires a fully front-loaded configuration to be of any use. What's more, if one wanted to prevent a site from running scripts without permission (like Google is), they would have to somehow know about it beforehand and add it to their blacklist. The YesScript plugin is cute and all, but I want something that prevents annoyances before I have to experience them. Not to mention the security issues. But at least YesScript makes no secret of that:

Unlike NoScript, YesScript does absolutely nothing to improve your security. I believe that Firefox is secure enough by default and that blocking all scripts by default is paranoia. YesScript strives to remove hassles from your browsing experience, rather than add them.

The mentality of reasonable security being seen as 'paranoia' and requiring minimal effort by the user as creating 'hassles' has been behind some of the worst information security breaches in history.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[BenoitRen]

The YesScript plugin is cute and all, but I want something that prevents annoyances before I have to experience them.

You're just trading the annoyance of running scripts for the annoyance of pages that don't work right/fully without JavaScript.

The mentality of reasonable security being seen as 'paranoia' and requiring minimal effort by the user as creating 'hassles' has been behind some of the worst information security breaches in history.

Except that blocking all JavaScript is not reasonable at all. It's one of the fundaments of today's web, and used on it everywhere for a variety of functions. By now JavaScript security in web browsers is well understood for it to not be worth thinking about by the end user. This isn't the late 90s anymore, and it's not like you're using IE.

In fact, if you're going to be this paranoid, you should use Lynx or even telnet.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[commodore64_love]

>>>some college kid

If you want to pay to upgrade me to a $50/month connection because webmasters like to stream megabytes of crap, instead of optimizing pages to fit in kilobytes... feel free to do so. What's that? You can't afford it? Well guess what. Neither can I.

It is unacceptable for webmasters to design sites that don't work properly on 1 megabit/s connections.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[commodore64_love]

>>>Second, it automatically shuts off on low bandwidth accounts.

Interesting. Google's Instant Update did not shutoff on my dialup line, probably because I have web accelerator (compression) turned on, and Netscape ISP's caching appears to be high bandwidth to google.com's viewpoint. You say it's automatic but you appear to be wrong.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[BlueKitties]

After further usage, the response time appears to be based on your browser's response rate. I was at a McDonald's yesterday with a nice hefty connection; Due to some background processes the computer slowed down, which seemed to trigger a switch to classic mode. That didn't have anything to do with the ISP, or even the download rates, just the response time from the current *window.* So, I'm going out on a limb here and saying you made that up as a hypothetical shortcoming of the system and claimed to have experienced it yourself.

And if it seems fishy I just "happened" to have made this discovery: I'm big on tech stuff, I was showing GInstant to some friends and seeing how it behaved on different connections. (I also got duped by PeterAnswers.com, which is awesome.)

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[Itninja]

I guess you and I use a different Interwebz. The number of sites I visit that "don't work right/fully without JavaScript" hover around 3-5%. And many of those are just poorly designed (i.e. failing to use the tag effectivly). Blithely allowing any site to run any client-side script it wants (e.g. javascript, vbscript, Flash) is foolhardy and naive. Malicious scripts being delivered to thousands (if not tens of thousands) of unsuspecting users is still a regular occurrence.

And it's ironic that you mention IE since it actually has the functionality of YesScript built-in. Go to a site, see a script you don't like, click on the little 'globe' in the status bar, add it to 'restricted sites', done. Takes about 7 seconds.

I am trading the quantifiable dangers of running scripts for the tiny percentage of sites that require them to work properly.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[BenoitRen]

I guess you and I use a different Interwebz. The number of sites I visit that "don't work right/fully without JavaScript" hover around 3-5%. And many of those are just poorly designed (i.e. failing to use the tag effectivly).

I'm just saying they're out there, and they're annoying. Good luck trying to shop on some of these sites.

Blithely allowing any site to run any client-side script it wants (e.g. javascript, vbscript, Flash) is foolhardy and naive.

Only if its implementation is broken and insecure. This is the case with VBScript, IE's Jscript and Flash. Not so with JavaScript, which is what we are actually talking about, in case you forgot.

Why aren't you afraid of HTML, CSS, or even images? After all, they're also untrusted content.

I am trading the quantifiable dangers of running scripts for the tiny percentage of sites that require them to work properly.

Those supposedly quantifiable dangers aren't real, and that's why you're being labelled paranoid.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[Itninja]

You do not understand how Javascript works. It's not as if JavaScript has some hard-coded limitations on what it can be used for. If scripts are allowed to run unchecked they can do anything to your PC the coder wants them to do. From reading the entire file system of your system, to launching full-screen video that cannot be terminated without unplugging your box, to more technical things like using the "Function.toString()" or launch those darling (and numerous) Facebook nasties. Unfettered script execution is exactly how so-called 'drive-by downloads' work. It's the scripting language I am afraid of, it what the coder does with it.

It appears you also do not understand HTML, CSS, or web images. There is zero possibility of HTML doing anything to you. It's a markup language, not a coding language. The only way HTML could hurt you was if was launching scripts (or showing a link to a site that did). Same goes for CSS. Nothing be executed with CSS, unless it invokes a script. And images? Are you kidding? The best they do is prompt someone to do something to themselves (like this one does).

Just spend a hour or so strolling through some sites (like those ending with .ru) and see how it goes. Have fun with that.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[BenoitRen]

You do not understand how Javascript works. It's not as if JavaScript has some hard-coded limitations on what it can be used for.

Actually, it does, especially in Mozilla web browsers.

If scripts are allowed to run unchecked they can do anything to your PC the coder wants them to do.

You're talking as if JavaScript is a programming language with direct access to memory, which it isn't (that's why it's called a scripting language!). There aren't even any interfaces to access the file system for JavaScript on the web.

That's why when someone manages to make JavaScript go out of its defined bounds by some means that we call them exploits and not language features.

There is zero possibility of HTML doing anything to you.

There have been crashes due to malformed HTML, and I wouldn't be surprised if there has been some exploit in the past where a load of HTML could trigger a buffer overflow and inject code that way. You know, exploits.

And images? Are you kidding?

Not at all.

Just spend a hour or so strolling through some sites (like those ending with .ru) and see how it goes. Have fun with that.

I did so several times in the past, as well as porn sites, and I didn't have any problems.

Re:Yeah it's crap.

[Itninja]

Exploits indeed. NoScript protects me from them...which is kind of the entire point. It not the intended use of JS, is the intended misuse that gets people (like you, I assume) to unknowingly open the door. On some of your particular points:

JavaScript local files access 'interfaces'

Of course there's not. You have to make it happen. It takes about 2 minutes.

HTML

Just because you "...wouldn't be surprised if there has been some exploit.." doesn't mean it's ever happened, or even if it's possible. Find some facts and then make a point.

Images

Really? A 5 y/o issue is the best you can do? The JS exploits I listed earlier were only a month out. What's more, any non-administrator (or non-Windows computer) was not harmed by WMF files (unlike like JS that can be a universal killer).

And I think any fantasy that it was harmless to allow JS (or any script) to auto-run was dispelled yesterday. No clicks required, no particular OS required, no admin rights required. Of course, NoScript users were immune from this.

No IE6 support

[tekrat]

Google has locked out thousands of businesses that have never upgraded browsers. Of course, that's the new trend. Weather.com doesn't work with IE6 either. Pretty soon Slashdot will not support ^^&#$%&... NO CARRIER

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:No IE6 support

[Emetophobe]

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Re:No IE6 support

[Gruturo]

Dropping IE6 is a good thing. It's hideous and not just aesthetically, but also from a security and standard support/compliance standpoint. I'm not advocating alienating all Internet Explorer users altogether (even though I quite dislike it), but dropping IE6 specifically is a *good* thing to do. Yeah some companies still force it on their users, shame on them (the companies).

Re:No IE6 support

[schon]

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

Bullshit.

I Just tried a search on Google, and it worked just fine. The "instant search" feature wasn't available, but it was in no way "locked out."

If IE6 was "locked out" of Google Search, then it wouldn't return any results at all. Not porting a new feature to an obsolete program is not "locked out".

Re:No IE6 support

[BlueKitties]

Strange, it's almost as if outdated technology is incompatible with new technology...

Re:No IE6 support

[Com2Kid]

Dude /. barely supports any browser.

Re:No IE6 support

[insufflate10mg]

Exactly. People expect to be able to use all the innovative products on the same shitty hardware they were using even just 5 years ago. Less than two thousand dollars later I bought a computer this year that will never lag, and won't crash even if I try. Every single feature on nearly every innovative website/service works flawlessly for me, simply because I chose to upgrade hardware to keep up with the corresponding software upgrades. Get a computer with a good graphics card, i7/equivalent, and 6GB of RAM. Not expensive at all, and you will run Vista without any problems, ever, let alone a stable Windows 7 distro.

I just don't like when people refuse to upgrade and then cry because new tech is "resource intensive" - *Hint: get more resources.

Re:No IE6 support

[MoriT]

Exactly. The additional effort to force modern features onto an antiquated, insecure, depreciated and unsupported browser was, for some reason, not worth it.

Re:No IE6 support

[mcgrew]

Actually, weather.com does work in IE6, but it loads very slowly and like Yahoo have a "warning" against it. Google works in IE6, it just doesn't have the "search as you type" feature.

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.

Re:No IE6 support

[amicusNYCL]

I just don't like when people refuse to upgrade and then cry

It's sort of like pulling out your cell phone from 2001 and bitching to your phone company that it doesn't support video calls. Maybe people think that software is magical, where it's all of a sudden going to have capabilities now that it didn't have 9 years ago when it was released. What they don't understand is that it does have new capabilities, but it's called IE8, not IE6.

Re:No IE6 support

[Cl1mh4224rd]

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.

Or, as the grandparent seems to subtly imply, simply halt innovation for the sake of catering to outdated technology.

Re:No IE6 support

[amicusNYCL]

It doesn't take a new PC to upgrade from a browser that is 9 years old.

Re:No IE6 support

[amicusNYCL]

What about Google? You can use Chrome if you want to, but you can also upgrade to IE8, Firefox, Opera, Safari, et al. This is about using a current browser, not online services. Google or not, you're going to be locked out from a lot of what the internet in general has to offer if you decide to stay with IE6. Or IE7, for that matter. And in a few months IE8 will be on that list also, whenever IE9 is ready.

Re:No IE6 support

[toddestan]

You can run a modern browser on a Pentium II. Granted, you're kind of screwed if it has Windows 98, so either install Linux or get your hands on Windows 2000.

Yes, I know technically you can run a modern browser on less, but below a P2 things get pretty painful.

Re:No IE6 support

[CrashNBrn]

Much like almost every Google app and feature: Disables Opera out of the box. It wasn't all that long ago that gmail and GoogleDocs needed to use a special string in the url to "allow" it to work with Opera, something like browserok=y or somesuch.

At least with Microsoft with this case all of the "neat" Bing features - just work.

Re:No IE6 support

[tehcyder]

You are totally misguided. Most businesses/business people don't ive a flying fuck about "the newest technologies like CSS3 and canvas", never mind which browser they are using.

If they bought a photocopier or fax machine 10 years ago and it is still working, the average business isn't going to replace it just because there's a cooler version out now.

Remember, for a lot of businesses IT is purely an overhead to be kept as low as possible.

Re:No IE6 support

[amicusNYCL]

Most businesses/business people don't ive a flying fuck about "the newest technologies like CSS3 and canvas", never mind which browser they are using.

I don't care what they give a flying fuck about. The level of technology on the internet is at a certain level, we'll call that X. If your corporate IT environment is below level X, then you cannot use current technologies. That's all there is to it. It's no more complex than that. They can give a flying fuck about whatever they want to give a flying fuck about, but if they want to use current technologies online then they need to upgrade their environment, not expect online service companies to come down to their level. We are actually actively trying to leave the level that IE6 represents, there's no reason for many major companies to continue supporting it.

In fact, you could say that online services companies like Google don't really give a flying fuck about IE6. We're not doing the same things online that we were doing 9 years ago.

Re:No IE6 support

[commodore64_love]

>>>thousands of businesses denying themselves access to services because they aren't willing to upgrade

And also as others have pointed-out, the employees can disable this feature and make Google.com IE6 compatible again. The problem will be for IT Admins to explain how to millions of computer-illiterate office workers. Several manhours will be lost. (shrug).

It's live now, and

[ultraexactzz]

...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.

Re:It's live now, and

[Nimey]

Doesn't do that for me. My Android phone can find my location easily, though.

Re:It's live now, and

[Locke2005]

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

Re:It's live now, and

[LordArgon]

It seems like a lot of people

1) want computers to read their minds (because they don't understand the technology)
2) get freaked out by good prediction (because they don't understand the technology)

Which is it gonna be people!?

Re:It's live now, and

[darpo]

For awhile now, Google has been using location awareness (via IP?) to deliver search results that are tailored to your region. So, for example, I am in Portland and I type "beer", one of the search suggestions is "beer festivals portland". Pretty cool, if slightly creepy.

Re:It's live now, and

[thijsh]

Apparently Google is also prescient of evil... try searching Google maps for 'Palestine', it's already gone! Pretty impressive indeed...

It's Easy! ...to disable!

[decipher_saint]

Just go to the Google homepage, wait five years for the fade in, click "Settings" -> "Search Settings"

Find the setting for "Google Instant" (hint, bottom of preferences list), select "Do not use Google Instant" and press Save.

Now if there was some easy way to disable the horrible, over-scripted image result page layout I'd be a happy camper!

Re:It's Easy! ...to disable!

[decipher_saint]

What the hell is a "mouse"?

Seriously though, the workstation/connection I have here at work I could move the mouse on Friday and the screen will update by Tuesday. To which I ask, what's the bloody point of it?

Re:It's Easy! ...to disable!

[TyFoN]

Somehow you missed the "Instant is on" drop down right next to the text entry field (to the right).

Re:It's Easy! ...to disable!

[devent]

Deactivate JavaScript for google?

Re:It's Easy! ...to disable!

[decipher_saint]

Yup, though to be fair I am legally blind.

Re:It's Easy! ...to disable!

[StuartHankins]

Surely I'm doing something wrong. I didn't see the "balls" everyone said was there. I didn't see the automatic search everyone said was there. And my Google Preferences has no mention of the term "Google Instant" or anything similar.

If it helps, I use the regular http://www.google.com/ address and I sign in to my account automatically. Tested with Firefox 4.0b4 and 4.0b5 on Snow Leopard.

Re:It's Easy! ...to disable!

[StuartHankins]

The only thing to the right of the text entry box on http://www.google.com/ is "Advanced Search" and "Language Tools". You have to move the mouse and wait for the fade-in to see them. Firefox 4.0b5 on Snow Leopard.

Re:It's Easy! ...to disable!

[phyrexianshaw.ca]

if you want to play with peoples toys, you have to play by their rules.

1) sign up for an account.
2) login over the next few days, try the features.

it's not brain surgery. hell, it's hardly even rocket science!

Re:It's Easy! ...to disable!

[Bwian_of_Nazareth]

Now if there was some easy way to disable the horrible, over-scripted image result page layout I'd be a happy camper!

How about clicking on "Switch to basic version" at the bottom of the page. Happy camping.

Re:It's Easy! ...to disable!

[takowl]

Now if there was some easy way to disable the horrible, over-scripted image result page layout I'd be a happy camper!

Scroll to bottom of page (yes, I know, it's a long way). Click "Switch to basic version". You're welcome.

And am I the only one here who likes the new image search? More images on screen at a time, and much quicker to get extra images.

Useful, for slow typists.

[lainproliant]

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

Re:Useful, for slow typists.

[lainproliant]

Well, it was there... hmm.

Re:Useful, for slow typists.

[AndrewNeo]

If you type fast, and make that a plus point, why are you wasting time going all the way to the main Google page to do a search?

Re:Useful, for slow typists.

[MoriT]

It also does it if you modify a search you've already made.

Re:Useful, for slow typists.

[truthsearch]

A 250ms delay would be a huge improvement. The same delay is very often used in autocomplete text boxes.

Re:Useful, for slow typists.

[lainproliant]

For the record, I wasn't making it a plus point, just a point of difference between myself and a user who would type his/her search queries more slowly. Its a great feature for those who type slowly, and makes search more accessible for them.

Censored

[Dyinobal]

The instant search thing seems to be censored. I type Por and wait and it doesn't suggest porn at all. I type Porn and wait for some suggestions and it doesn't do anything at all. Whats the point when the thing is filtered?

Re:Censored

[lazorz]

Nice catch - just tested it.
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! :P

Also, max string length = 100 chars, over 100 chars you need to press "Search", same as with "porn"

Re:Censored

[tekrat]

That's probably because they didn't want to be sued by some irate parent when little johnny was searching for hints for the game portal but as he typed "por" he was suggested porn.

Re:Censored

[game kid]

Welcome to Google server 17. It's safer here.

Re:Censored

[Affenkopf]

# The search term violates our autocomplete policies. We aim to provide you with relevant search queries, but we exclude a narrow class of search queries related to pornography, violence, and hate speech.

Useless feature without porn.

Re:Censored

[c 0xFF]

The suggestions must be ranked by popularity. After all, nobody looks for porn on the internet, right?

Re:Censored

[networkBoy]

Because I'm at work.
turn off safe search in your prefs and see what happens.

On an aside:
We have a paranoid-strict content filter at work...
I turned off safe search and I think I just lit up IS's indicator panel like a Christmas tree :-)

That was fun. Tons of little "this item was blocked" pictures as images tried to come up...

Re:Censored

[Darth_brooks]

They may just be keeping the results manageable for whatever buffering they're doing.

I mean, really, who looks for 'porn' on the internet? No one uses that generic of a term. That would be like using 12345 as the combination for your luggage.

Re:Censored

[AndrewNeo]

Don't drink the kool-aid. They put something in it, to make you forget. I don't even remember what I was searching for.

Re:Censored

[larry bagina]

Eric Schmidt insisted that safe search filtering be put in place. Seems he was giving a demo and it suggested "mountain view glory holes". Must have been a bug, eh Schmidt?

Re:Censored

[zero_out]

Does anyone remember the old autocomplete, before it got removed for a while? It was because there was a huge amount of negative publicity when someone would type "blacks are" and the first autocomplete suggestions were lazy, stupid, criminals, and a few other negative things. I think they learned that censorship is good for them when it comes to predictive algorithms. Imagine a kid at home, doing a report on porcupines, and when they type in P O R, getting flooded with porn links. That would not be good for Google, to say the least.

Re:Censored

[oldhack]

That's not funny, it's god damn INFORMATIVE. Saved me 5 minutes of my life.

Re:Censored

[roman_mir]

That would be like using 12345 as the combination for your luggage.

- jesus, fuck, crap not again. There we go again, I keep changing that combination, but I always change it to 12345, then somebody posts it, then I change it again to 12345.

Can you please stop posting this, I am tired of changing the goddamn combination over and over!

Re:Censored

[PagosaSam]

I liked the internet so much better when the prudes were scared of it.
Let's return now to those thrilling days of yesteryear!

Re:Censored

[zekele2]

Not sure why the parent comment is modded "Funny"... This is the most significant change made today, not the fancy Javascript stuff. Google has been set to block "NSFW" searches by default - this is pure censorship by Google based on unknown values.

So now you can't search for the UK city of Scunthorpe, and some people with text strings in their name which some Google droid has added to their unaccountable blacklist have also simply disappeared from the new regular search results.

Google Search is becoming like Apple's products - sanitized according to respect the arbitrary moral values of an up-tight, unaccountable elite.

Re:Censored

[sorak]

The suggestions must be ranked by popularity. After all, nobody looks for porn on the internet, right?

No. We never have a shortage.

Re:Censored

[russotto]

So now you can't search for the UK city of Scunthorpe

You might want to try these things before making silly claims.

Re:Censored

[DragonWriter]

Google has been set to block "NSFW" searches by default - this is pure censorship by Google based on unknown values.

Except that that hasn't happened.

It won't autocomplete certain search terms regardless of SafeSearch settings, but the only filtering on search results is what is already provided by SafeSearch (which, IIRC, has defaulted to "Moderate" setting for years, but can be turned off.)

So now you can't search for the UK city of Scunthorpe

I just did, and Google reported about 40,100,000 results, the first of which is a Google Maps result for Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire, UK.

So I don't see the problem. Maybe dial down the paranoia a notch or two?

Re:Censored

[penguinchris]

That's not quite true, if you do an actual search for any of these things (assuming you have safesearch turned off) the results turn up like normal. They just don't want people to be surprised by "interesting" things showing up in the instant results when they start typing a word like "assume".

For your example of Scunthorpe, I typed the first few letters and various other results showed up (this is not a commonly searched for or famous place), but when I had "scunt" typed in all the results were about Scunthorpe. Now, if it was Cunthorpe, even, the results will blank out when you have "cunt" but things start showing up again when you enter more letters. I also tried Cockfosters, a dirty sounding UK placename, and they don't blank out the results for cock... it thinks I want cocktail dresses at that point.

So basically, you're wrong and making wrong assumptions. I assume you didn't even try it, or you have safesearch on and didn't realize it.

I have to admit this would be interesting if there was a way to enable "dirty" words in the instant search, and if you could do instant image search (with dirty words enabled of course). As it is, if you're creative you can come up with words it doesn't block but which will yield you interesting results ;)

Re:Censored

[Dyinobal]

Why did I get modded funny?

Re:Censored

[Anonymous Coward]

Why did I get modded funny?

They're nothing but slaves and drones mate.

Re:So when did this happen?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this, the unofficial Google PR site?

Only when it's not an official Apple fanboi site

Isn't this search.yahoo.com?

[Grubbsie]

Looks awfully similar to me.

Re:Isn't this search.yahoo.com?

[chill]

Remember that "Do you Yahoo?" commercial.

It turns out the answer is "No".

I prefer Google fresh brewed.

[filesiteguy]

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?

Re:I prefer Google fresh brewed.

[Facegarden]

...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?

Those aren't search results, those are other suggested search terms. Different.

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

[Araghorn]

or you can just disable instant search, right next to the search bar

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:So stupid on so may ways

[MrWeelson]

See earlier replies, when you first search with the new grooviness, on the results page next to the search box you will see 'Instant is on'...?
Click it, choose 'Off', job done, no drama.

Re:So stupid on so may ways

[SleeknStealthy]

hahahahahahah....your use of logic is spot on...this is both gimmicky and worthless. not to mention the fact that it isn't instant. just shows you that google is becoming a fading giant, they are running out of real ideas

Re:So stupid on so may ways

[Lunix Nutcase]

They disable javascript for google.com. It also means you get to do away with the new horrid image search page too.

Re:So stupid on so may ways

[PagosaSam]

Whoa... They know I'm running Ubuntu. It comes up at the top when I get to "linu". I wonder if they know my shoe size???

Re:So stupid on so may ways

[PagosaSam]

Could be. Wouldn't be the first time. Woof, woof!

Re:So stupid on so may ways

[devent]

My point is still valid. If I type "W" maybe I want weather, maybe I want "Wikipedia". Than I type "Wik", maybe I want "Wikipedia", maybe I want something completely different. Why should I be bothered with the stuff I don't care about?

Software should not be intelligent, it should do what I say. Maybe the software gets it 99% right, but the 1% that it gets wrong is so annoying that you are going to use a different software.

The auto completion in the search field is a good thing, because it's not too annoying if it's gets it wrong. But the reload of the whole site with stuff I don't care about can be really annoying.

Re:So stupid on so may ways

[BlueKitties]

It reloads parts of the site. Also the search box is fixed, so at worst you have something flashing in the corner of your eyes. Try honestly using it for more than a day, perhaps?

Does not work that way.

[Hatta]

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."

By giving me partial results while I'm typing, you distract me, slow down my typing even more, and delay the good results I'll get from a complete query.

Re:Does not work that way.

[Even on Slashdot FOE]

I type fast enough to get ahead of it AND read fast enough to know what it was suggesting. Some of the suggestions just leave me annoyed. >.

Google.com ?

[Grizzley9]

I hope I'm not the only geek that never goes there. Why waste the clicks? Just go to the search engine window in the browser. Double good when you can select where you want to search such as Wikipedia, Youtube, Dictionary, or the hundreds of others.

I always visit Google.com when new things like this come up or they have fancy Google pics, but I don't see the reason to go there.

Have the eyebleach handy

[Dancindan84]

For when you're searching for "big black couch" to refurnish your rec room.

Re:Have the eyebleach handy

[StuartHankins]

+1 Insightful. Wow I hadn't gotten that far to think of that yet... I guess it also means you might see other unsavory things with snippets of searches too. What if you're in a place where the act of searching for certain items is outlawed or a crime... could you be held liable for auto-searches on a snippet of text?

Re:Have the eyebleach handy

[Dancindan84]

It seems to be censored, but I can still imagine some unwanted results possibly popping up at inopportune moments. "Honestly Dear, I was in the middle of searching for gigantic asteroids and that just popped up on the screen. Hun...?"

Re:Have the eyebleach handy

[daveime]

Wait till you try "Japanese Schoolgirl Les"

(son Plans)

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:Ad revenue driver?

[clarkkent09]

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.

Re:Ad revenue driver?

[catbutt]

They charge per click, so obviously, no.

Re:Ad revenue driver?

[DragonWriter]

Is this supposed to drive up ad revenue?

In that it is supposed to make Google more useful to the masses and be a competitive advantage against other search engines, thus increasing Google's ability to retain and/or gain search usage share, and therefore have more opportunities to present ads to users than if it lost usage share to its competitors, yes.

Other than that, probably not.

Re:Ad revenue driver?

[StikyPad]

Pretty sure the prediction algorithm is based on popularity, given which, it's more plausible that someone would be looking for the results you mentioned than, say, "server virtualization", "existentialism", "marky mark", or "best practices for posting to public forums."

Re:Ad revenue driver?

[farble1670]

yes interesting. i can't say it *always* favors ad revenue related results, it almost always does.

Re:Ad revenue driver?

[robot256]

Just curious. I was amused by some of the other comments about how useless it actually is to the user, so wondered if there was an ulterior motive. I wonder if this will be another experiment like the "customizable background" fiasco earlier this summer.

Re:Ad revenue driver?

[tonycheese]

That theory's nice and all, but it doesn't make sense that they would do that. They want usability and a tiny amount of ad revenue isn't going to change that.

If you were searching for "extraterrestrial life", typed in an "e", and got expedia, I highly doubt you'd suddenly get an urge to go traveling. You would simply keep typing until you got a relevant search result.

If you type in "q" right now, you get quotes and Quebec fires as two of your top results.

Re:Ad revenue driver?

[HybridST]

...or type "ebay" in to the address bar and hit + for the truly lazy!

Re:Ad revenue driver?

[kc0dby]

It is almost like they are bringing back "AOL Keywords" in a much more "under-the-radar" way. How long before ebay just says "type e into Google!" once they have the contract nailed down. Perhaps there will also be a subliminal effect- maybe not in with freaky effectiveness, but definitely enough so everybody who searches for something beginning with "e" will have Ebay, Expedia, etc. at the top of their mind when transitioning to the next thing to search for.

Re:Just like Yahoo

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

You posted Anonymously... so you obviously do know that calling him a fucking moron was probably a bit harsh.... no?

"That's 11 hours saved every second."

[DieByWire]

So... 110 hours of using Google Instant should get me 500 years into the future. Then maybe, just maybe, I'll know if the Cubs win a World Series.

Browser search bars

[catbutt]

I don't see how they are going to provide a consistant UI on Chrome -- or any browser with a search bar, but especially one with a search bar integrated with the address field. I like the feature, but don't like how it never does it on my first search, since that is via the search field on Chrome. I'm sure they'll update Chrome to deal with this somehow, but I can't think of a nice way of doing it.

Pity the slow typer...

[bobdotorg]

... who gets most of the way through a search for goatseller

Re:Pity the slow typer...

[by (1706743)]

Or, "pictures of a huge cockroach."

Re:Pity the slow typer...

[brentrad]

Apparently the programmers at Google have read slashdot before. Type "goats" and it gives you instant results. Once you type the "e" though instant search shuts off.

For those of you Complaining

[men0s]

For those of you complaining about this - or other - features that seem to slow down your machine: you can always use the search bar in whatever major browsing you're using.

If you use Google as your homepage there are options to disable at least this feature. However, I'm one of those crazies that just opens up the previous sessions windows, always mindful to close out potentially shocking or embarrassing tabs.

YMMV.

Re:For those of you Complaining

[KingAlanI]

that's what I was about to say; it does save a click in not having to head to the search site, I guess it saves me these bells and whistles as well.

Love it

[Flipao]

It'll be a while before it begins to shine but it's pretty darn promising.

btw, don't like it?, turn it off, it'll remember and stop annoying you :)

Re:So when did this happen?

[Mitchell314]

Fuck guys, there is *life* beyond Google you know...

There's a what? Is that like a mushroom?

Re:Easy Fix For This

[Flipao]

Altavista is owned by Yahoo, who now get their search results from Bing. How about living a day without Microsoft instead?

Hell yeah!

[PinkyGigglebrain]

I liked the old Google start page.

No scripts or gimmicks, just clean and simple.

_

Google: redefining human perfromance. Umm, no.

[tibit]

LOL. 30ms to "glance" at another part of the page? What kind of koolaid are they drinking?

Sure, the saccade may take that long, but the processing of the image will take an extra 150ms+ on top of that, give or take. IOW: there is no basis in physiology for what they are doing.

Re:Google: redefining human perfromance. Umm, no.

[DrDitto]

Um, Google measured it using some pretty fancy tools.

Re:Google: redefining human perfromance. Umm, no.

[prshaw]

And I thought they googled for the numbers.

Re:Google: redefining human perfromance. Umm, no.

[tibit]

There is no way to measure it any other way than it was done for the last 40+ years or so: using an eye tracker. When you do so, in all visual stimuli experiments where your subsequent eye motion is based on what you currently see (visual guidance, it's called), the repetition rate is below 10Hz. More like 5Hz. The methodology used to measure those numbers can't improve them: if it does, then the methodology is flawed, for the limit is in our brain. Hardcoded magic number, if you like.

Re:Where's the Opera support?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I have to wonder why Opera is not on the supported browser list.

It's not a "supported list" it's a "first beta tester's list". They're rolling out gradually by platform and country so they have time to test. No mobile platforms are using it yet, including Chrome on Android. No one in Portugal gets it either.

They wrote, "Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll work to roll out Google Instant to all geographies and platforms". I assume that means once they get around to testing the various versions of Opera, they'll start enabling it for Opera users as well. In the mean time, you'll just have to spoof your browser string, wait, or use a different browser to test this feature.

It really makes me think that there's a conspiracy out there to ensure Opera never becomes popular.

That's just what the government implanted nanobots altering your brain chemistry are programmed to make you think. Seriously, there's no conspiracy. Developers target the big platforms first, because that's where the users are. Opera is usually fine anyway, but falls into the category of "edge cases". As someone who does test some Web apps professionally, I can tell you, I set many of the priorities and Opera on Win XP is right about in the same category as Safari on Windows XP, near the bottom of the list.

I was trying to get info on S. Am. nations. . .

[JSBiff]

Well, I wanted to search for info on specific South American nations, but I never got passed "Bra".

The other nice feature is hidden

[sconeu]

in the panel on the left.

Select "more search tools" and then select "Fewer shopping sites"

Re:The other nice feature is hidden

[commodore64_love]

That's great until you actually want a shopping site (like to find the cheapest HD Radio possible).

I hate their new Image search page which, instead of just displaying images, runs some CPU intensive script that expands/shrinks images as you pass over them. What used to be a fast, pleasant browse is now like walking through molasses. It's so annoying that I'm trying to figure out how to turn if off and go back to the "old" plain images, but the option does not exist.

It's a conspiracy

[thetoadwarrior]

They know people want to disable so Google and the Rand corporation in conjunction with the saucer people have come up with this to force you to sign up for a google account so they can steal your life.

uhg title tag

[wmaker]

once you type in a search result... if you leave it there for a moment, it changes the 'title' html tag, even after erasing the enter contents of the text box, the title tag remains the same as my previous search. very annoying.

huge waste of resources

[Ofloo]

This is ridicules, .. and huge waste of resources, .. while you are typing you get like 20 query and this crap uses ajax it's a waste of bandwidth and cpu, energy, ..

No IE7 support, either

[DragonWriter]

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

No, it hasn't. They can still use Google search. "Not extending a new UI convenience to users using older browsers" is not the same as locking-out the people using those browsers.

ADD for the modern age

[MoriT]

I keep forgetting what I'm typing half way through when random pages start jumping out at me half way through.

Re:Where's the Opera support?

[pi8you]

I'm not seeing any technical reason for the block as this (like yesterday's floating balls and the custom backgrounds introduces a little while back) seems to work fine in Opera if you edit the site preferences to mask as Firefox when browsing Google.

Yeah, that's the problem....

[Jozza The Wick]

The 2 ~ 5 seconds between me hitting the 'Google Search' button & clicking on the first link I find... Has anyone ever even noticed those few seconds? Are we all that impatient? :)

Correcting my carelessness

[causality]

Damn, that first sentence should read "who has not added 'google.com' to my allow list."

Google - now with 2-5 seconds more time

[kaychoro]

Google Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search

Now they can use the extra 2-5 seconds for annoying animating doodles.

Re:Where's the Opera support?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I'm not seeing any technical reason for the block...

Do you see a technical reason for the block on mobile chrome? How about for mobile Safari? The point is this is Google's bread and butter, their main site and the second most visited site on the whole freaking internet! They're not going to just hope it works in browsers they haven't tested, so until they get around to properly testing the new beta feature fully on each browser and in each language, they're sticking with the old version. Can you not see how that makes more business sense to whitelist browsers and languages one at a time, rather then rolling it out to everyone and waiting to hear complaints from millions of people?

Re:Where's the Opera support?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I am a web developer too and just by sticking to standards my pages tend to work flawlessly with Opera on the first try. Usually I find myself tweaking things for FireFox and IE to make it look normal.

Generally I see problems with IE 6, then other flavors of IE, then the occasional Safari, Chrome, Opera, or Firefox bug in equal numbers. But that doesn't mean it's smart to roll out a new high volume site without thoroughly testing, and for a beta it makes a ton of sense to start whitelisting browsers as they are tested then collecting feedback on those browsers while another team thoroughly tests each browser/version/OS version/major plugins before adding it to the whitelist.

too many are looking at their keyboard, !screen

[Locutus]

" 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"

ya but...those numbers are useless when so many don't know how to type without looking at the keyboard. Teaching ten finger typing skills are still elected teachings at most US schools. So while it might be great for the few skilled at typing, the vast majority of people are probably going to hate it. Oh, and those who hate it will be the ones who'll just love Microsoft and their marketing... I mean linkless Bing search and it's pretty pictures.

LoB

List of Google Instant 1-letter abbreviations

[jetcityorange]

Here's a list of the Google Instant 1-letter abbreviations: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AqcLXe96ybBEdHhLejJBVEFJRUFJTnFJcXkwM0RMYUE&hl=en Who do I have to talk with to get "JetCityOrange" to come up when I type "J".

I use browser search feature

[Romario77]

So, this would not help much. To search I click Ctrl+K in Firefox and type the search terms. Doesn't seem to be supported by instant search, may be in the future.

Like most here I think..

[SuperCharlie]

I dont think apart from being on someone elses computer I have seen googles home page in a few years. I dont want googles home page, I want search results. Its built into the browsers I use so why am I supposed to take the extra step of going to their home page before typing in my search? Do whatever ya want on your homepage google..just leave the browser tools to do their job.

Bug when Instant is Off and Background Image is on

[Azureflare]

There's a bug if you turn off instant search and you have a background image; if you start typing it just removes the background image and everything shifts around on the page.

I find myself using the url bar in Chrome for google searches more often anyways. Since it guesses URLs as well as doing google searches, it is more efficient than using the google homepage.

Awesome! Bar! None!

[tunapez]

The backlash to FF's Annoying Bar must not have been felt at Googs Corp.

Guess who I just removed from my NoScript whitelist...

Google Instant == Google Hype

[r7]

Cannot believe the hype this is getting. I even heard about it on anti-technical NPR radio this morning. No experienced engineers, however, are taking it seriously. It is clearly an excess of marketing / PR with a very low signal to noise (substance to hype) ratio.

Does Google seriously think this "feature" will be popular? If so I fear for their future. Casting about for new ideas this far off-base indicates either their marketing department is overstaffed or they are going down the path of Yahoo...

Really Interesting

[benjamin razon]

Very cool, and I like how they have some concrete data behind the change and not that it simply looks cool. Just wondering is there a way to still use the regular old google?

Re:Why no Opera support?

[CrashNBrn]

Its not American.

Heavy load

[nsebban]

Seems to me they find a clever way of testing their platforms under a very heavy, yet realistic, load.

A ploy to increase sign-ins

[dugeen]

The only way to turn this sh1t off is to change your search preferences, and for that to stick, you either have to keep a Google perma-cookie, or always be logged in with a Google account when you search. I've created a separate account just for searches so that Google can't link my search goals to my other interests.

What about the split-second ad impressions?

[kriston]

Does Google log an advertisement impression for each keystroke? That doesn't seem fair to charge advertisers for advertisements that only appear for a split-second as you type. I wonder what the FTC thinks about that.

Re:They need some UI talent. BADLY.

[symbolic]

I can't believe Google releases some of the stuff it does, in the condition it's in. Who EVER thought that presenting a screen with a search field, and then jarringly changing the ENTIRE LAYOUT as soon as a user types the first letter, was a good idea? The concept is interesting and may have value, but the execution is horrible.