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Google Give Searchers 'Instant Previews' of Result Pages
First pressing 'Enter' was to much work... now actually clicking on the links and visiting the sites is to much, too... Google is testing instant previews, where you can see a miniature rendered view of the landing page without requiring you to click through and back-arrow.
And that's to turn off Javascript, which returns it to the original, clean, doesn't-suck-donkey-dick home page with a box to type in the search term and a couple of buttons to click.
The instant search results are a pain for me. They violate my back button expectations and they interfere with my web searching workflow: I may alter my query in preperation for the next iteration while still scanning the page for links to open in new tabs.
It also uses excessive bandwidth by searching for me--and causing the page scrollbar to jump around jarringly--when I am not done typing.
One thing I always liked about Google right from the first is that they're *lightweight* and fast. Clutter free and minimal to the greatest extent possible. I understand with things like the never-ending-image-search and instant results from queries they're trying to compete with the glitz of bing and other so-called competitors, but this seriously hurts the experience for users like me. Please, Google! You don't have to compete on glitz when you have a hands-down superior product!
I want my Cowboyneal
Dammit, all I want is simple search. I don't want previews, or weighted results, or guessing what I really meant, or a map and pictures and previews of everything that happens to come up in the list of results. Just give me the damned plain search and the naked results. Stop wasting my time with YOUR idea of what YOU think I wanted.
Oh wait, that should be "What your ADVERTISERS think I wanted". My mistake.
Google got popular because it was SIMPLE and FAST. It's a damned shame there's no competition left that believes in simple search, so now even Google feels free to tell us how WE want to search.
What the search world needs is a reset, back to what Google was like when it was new and still eager to collect more eyeballs, instead of the 800 pound gorilla that dictates how every web page is optimized and which ones we get to see when we go looking for something.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I don't want to see a single new Google technology until they put the Google image search back to the way it used to be before they shitified it. It's so damned annoying to use now that I'm actually using Bing when I want to search images.
I don't like the feature, on Google, that moves an indicator when I press my arrow keys and lets me (forces me to) select the link with the enter key. I use my arrow keys for scrolling, not for navigation within the embedded HTML. I have a strong feeling I'm not going to like this either.
Remember when Google won us all over with their simplistic no frills search results? Why do people feel the need to fix what is not broken??
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
Improving the snippets of website text, shown in normal results, would be much more useful than this visual, well, gimmick.
Easy too - simply by allowing more text to be shown (technically easy at least, because I guess we would get more "Google is stealing from us!" a'la Murdoch)
PS. Option of bigger (say, two to three line, configurable) snippets would be useful in Slashdot D2, too.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Um, yes, I'd hope that Google Instant was censored because who wants to type in something innocent and have it come up with a porn site? Do you really want to be searching for something like "Sexual Harassment Lawsuits" and simply have all the sites for "sex" or "sexual" come up whenever you type them?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Click "Instant Is On", click "Off". Tadaa! You're right back to the 'good old days'.
Personally, i thought Instant was jarring and annoying at first, but I decided to give it a couples days to get used to it. Turns out I think it's actually pretty nice, if nothing else it lets you change your queries on the fly, adding more keywords if necessary to narrow down your search by just continuing to type.
But in this case you need a machine and an internet connection, and not inconsiderable muscle built into both.
The point of the enter button was that you could construct your query, send it once, and let the big iron at google do all the work for you, instead of plowing all the intermediate results into your battery- and bandwidth-challenged device.
So while Google is meeting your goal of automating repetitive tasks, it's also making work for itself, mostly just to impress you, but costing you more than you think in the process.
Google must be a consultant.
I'd rather see them automate spam filtering in the search results than input termination. Sifting through all the ads and fake pages feels a lot more repetitive than pressing Enter.
But in this case you need a machine and an internet connection, and not inconsiderable muscle built into both.
But at some point you too must realise that it is no longer 1995. It's like all the arguments that Google became popular because it was simple and it was fast. Well yes I also cherished simplicity and speed when my 56k modem was kicking in the turbos just to load my results. These days a large part of the world is absorbing bandwidth via youtube videos over ADSL2 if they're lucky, and you know what? Google still seems just as fast to me now, except even easier to use and faster to parse results.
If you're worried maybe you should see the headline at the top of slashdot right now: "Dutch ISP Demos Symmetric 100Mbps DOCSIS3"