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Google Has Dropped Google Instant Search
- bonaldi 9y agoSo "I'm Feeling Lucky" is a real and clickable button again!
- Sylos 9y agoWould have been before, too, if you had JavaScript disabled, wouldn't it? But yeah, that is interesting. They supposedly lose/lost a lot of money from that button, as it skips past their ads. Also, they are supposedly redesigning the Google Homepage [0], moving away from having just the search field there to having a news feed, the weather and some such there as well. So, maybe this change is in anticipation of that and maybe they'll also tuck some ads into there then, to actually monetize the time people spend on their homepage. [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/20/google-change-home-page-first-time-since-1996-app-based-feed-news-events-sports https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/20/google-ch...
- red_admiral 9y agohttps://google.com/webhp?complete=0 https://google.com/webhp?complete=0 still works for me. No instant, no suggestions, just type and press enter.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- alexkavon 9y agoGood. This was their most useless and wonky feature. Not sure how this was supposed to change search.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- waqf 9y agoYes, this feature had negative value for me. A common use case is that I'm copying keywords from search result snippets back into the search bar to make a more refined followup search, and Instant Search snatches the result away while I'm trying to copy text from it.
- and0 9y agoThis is exactly what drove me crazy about it.
- alistproducer2 9y ago>Google Instant launched in 2010 under the leadership of Marissa Mayer. Mayer called this change a “fundamental shift in search”.... So Mayer does it again, lol. My favorite thing is how this lady was praised as some sort of genius for managing the Google search page - as if that page is some marvel of modern engineering and not just a webpage with and input and no background.
- nrdwavexe 9y agolol alphabet is worth over $600 billion and when the story comes out its all > blame the woman who used to work here this is jew-tier. Creating a world where you can blame a woman for something you're responsible for is classic jew.
- _jordan 9y agoAgreed though the effect this page has on how billions of people consume information is huge - I think the idea was to close the gap as much as possible on 'have a thought -> receive information'.
- chris_va 9y agoHm, let's not have personal attacks here, especially for a topic on which you do not have any personal experience. Having worked on Google Search during this period, I can say definitively that your comment is mostly incorrect. Features at Google are generally bottom-up driven. Mayer was in many ways acting as a gatekeeper to keep some of the crazier stuff from harming the experience or brand.
- alien1993 9y agoI had Instant Search on for just one reason: movement with arrow keys. Since they killed it's bothering me, I hope they bring at least this option back. If not does anyone else has a solution?
- frik 9y agoThe reason, Google wants to display some content (cards with news/trending topics) on the Google frontpage.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- have_faith 9y agoDid the auto search terms contribute to things like Google trends? like half finished searches effecting popularity of an adwords search phrase or similar?
- x1798DE 9y agoThis is awesome news. It was always a pain to set up my search engine to have instant off - and of course instant turns back on if you performed a second search on the results page of the no-instant page. I have never once had my search experience enhanced by this anti-feature, and most of the time it's a hindrance, because I'll start reading the search results, then based on that come up with a new query and start typing it while continuing to scan the page. In non-instant world, maybe 60% of the time I'll end up finding what I want to click on as I continue to scan the page, then stop typing and click on that (or I'll be reading the name of someone that I want to google from the except from the page). In instant world, I have to read the whole page, decide if I need to make a new query, then type it (which is the exact opposite of the intent of instant, mind you). The worst thing about Instant was that if you started typing something that didn't have results it wanted to display (because maybe it was a NSFW-type query or because it just didn't have good results for the incomplete string), rather than leaving the old page up until it had something it wanted to show, it would just blank the old page. Horrible.
- benhoyt 9y agoYeah, I worked for Oyster (www.oyster.com) and had NSFW instant search issues all the time -- if I mistyped our site domain with two W's as "ww.o" the Instant Search results displayed a rather lewd image. Uh, sorry boss, that wasn't what I was after.
- jxramos 9y agoI wasn't even aware of this feature, sounds dangerous indeed to jump the gun and search for things as I'm entering the search. Search suggestions make sense, overly eager premature searches not so much.
- legostormtroopr 9y agoProbably shouldn't have tried to search for that ("ww.o") at work.
- bambax 9y ago> It was always a pain to set up my search engine to have instant off - and of course instant turns back on if you performed a second search on the results page If you have an account it stays off? I always hated instant and disabled it, and never had to disable it again...?
- Coincoin 9y agoGood riddance. This was a marketing feature more than anything else so google could boast about how fast their search engine was. However, it always had tons of usability problems for no added benefit to the user, especially when refining a previous search, or trying to retype some funky word you found in the results.
- puzzle 9y agoYes, part of it was marketing, but there were benefits, too, e.g. for slow typers, which of course do not abound in this corner of the Internet.
- johansch 9y agoIn my experience these slow typists also tend to look at the keyboard while they are typing - not at the screen. Thereby completely negating the benefit for this group of people. I guess that for the intersection of slow typists who look at the screen while typing, Instant Search is useful. But how big is this intersection really?
- praneshp 9y agoMy sample set of 1 (mom) types char, then looks at screen on loop.
- johansch 9y agoThat must be even more excruciating to watch than my mom, who types the entire search string while looking at the keyboard. If I try to hint and say, "look, there's an autocompletion thing that has already guessed correctly what you are painfully trying to write, why don't you click the top suggestion?" she just shushes me away (she's busy concentrating on typing). So I have stopped doing that, and am now just resigned to sit and wait, whenever these things happen.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mstade 9y agoDoes this mean we can regain the backspace-to-go-back that's been everywhere since forever, but was killed by Chrome because of instant search?
- untog 9y agoIIRC backspace-to-go-back was not killed because of instant search, it was killed because users kept going back when they didn't mean to, because they thought they were typing in a text box and weren't.
- seanp2k2 9y agoThere's still e.g. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/backspace-to-go-back/nlffgllnjjkheddehpolbanogdeaogbc?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/backspace-to-go-ba... but IMO it's ridiculous to not just make this an option. Hide it in a flag. https://venturebeat.com/2016/08/14/restore-backspace-shortcut-chrome/ https://venturebeat.com/2016/08/14/restore-backspace-shortcu... they decided that 400k users was not enough to warrant a flag for. But hey, cmd+q to quit immediately, with "warn before quit" off by default is a great idea. No need to look at that one or make it possible to change the key bind. Never mind that it's one key away from cmd+tab. This is the kind of stuff you get when you make decisions based on A/B testing.
- jackcarter 9y agoThere's a hack to sort-of disable the keybind: Go to chrome://extensions/ and open "Keyboard Shortcuts" (bottom right). Pick an extension you don't use anymore (or install one), and set the shortcut for "Activate the extension" to cmd+q or ctrl+shift+q.
- peacelilly 9y agoYes, it was killed for this reason. Singular hotkeys that drastically alter state are a horrible UI design decision. When commanding, controlling, or altering a program, the trigger should be an explicit action. One accidental key stroke should not be catastrophic.
- andybak 9y agoI rather liked Instant Search but it dawns on me that I hadn't noticed it's absence as I never go to the Google homepage any more. Searching from the address bar is all I ever do - and that doesn't seem to have changed.
- amelius 9y agoGood. And now stop changing Google. I don't want to be surprised every time I use your tools. (Edit: And that holds for the doodle too. They are sometimes funny, but not so much so as to warrant making me lose focus. I'm working, not watching TV)
- Bartweiss 9y agoMy least-favorite change is that the All/Image/Shopping/News buttons on the search page rearrange based on your choice of term. Static-looking features shouldn't shuffle themselves around based on my form inputs! (It's worse because I've never wanted the Shopping button, ever, but it's bad design regardless.)
- amiga-workbench 9y agoNever found this particularly nice to use, at least this will drop their server load a bit.
- popcorncolonel 9y agoI'd be interested to see if this is actually true.
- ralusek 9y agoWhether it is actually true is going to be entirely based on what you consider to be "a bit" of server load. They had to return data for many search results on entry, in addition to suggested autocomplete. Now they just return suggested autocomplete. I'm sure everything in google instant is served from a cached cdn, but it's still going to be "some" server load that is removed.
- jokoon 9y agoAuto complete is already an awesome feature to have, instant search is clutter, it creates too much traffic, and sometimes it doesn't work (nothing shows for a while). Now it would be nice if google would stop choosing french as a search language because I live there, I have to set it up everyday and I don't want to enable cookies... I don't know if I can access google with english as default in some special page.
- Animats 9y agoDoes anybody really look at the Google home page any more? Browsers and mobile devices all have search boxes now. Bing tried putting good artwork on their home page, and nobody noticed. Google's "robots.txt" file doesn't let bots read their home page. Most other pages on Google are bot-readable, but not the home page. It's like they don't want it to be indexed by other search engines. That might change once it gets content.
- odammit 9y agoWell there goes an entire category of meme. RIP internet.
- _delirium 9y agoThe search suggestions are still there, so the various memes around "why do ..." still work. The part that's been removed is that Google Instant used to start showing you the results page as you typed, before hitting enter.
- odammit 9y agoOhhhhh. I misunderstood. Thank the lulz gods.
- matt_heimer 9y agoNot really, the memes revolve around the suggested auto-completions which the article says will still be around.
- WalterBright 9y agoThe article web site crashes Chrome.
- johnhenry 9y agoI suspect this has more to do with recent European regulations than anything else. Instantly sending search queries without [explicit] confirmation is a minefield of liability for the company.
- pavement 9y agoWow, finally. This was such a disruptive feature. Completely distracting from the moment you interact with the page. This wasn't a productivity bonus in any way, regardless of purported reading recognition rates and eye tracking/movement measurements. No, computer. You wait until I'm finished. You wait until I tell you I want you to do something. You don't jump at every flinch of my fingers. Not all interactions require reaction.
- Bartweiss 9y agoNow if only they would stop swapping Images, News, and Shopping link around based on my search. I want a picture of whatever I searched for, that's why I clicked the button next to 'All' like I have a thousand times before - don't reorder your damn links from page to page!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- droidist2 9y agoOh man, I hate that, especially when it pushes up Maps and relegates Videos to the "More" menu. Google tries to be way too clever for its own good.
- Bartweiss 9y agoYep, that's the worst. Reordering static-looking buttons is awful, but promoting options in and out of a secondary menu is completely deranged design.
- ralphie02 9y agoOh man, thought it was just me. Always hated that 'feature'
- jmcdiesel 9y agoI didn't mind it, but I wont miss it either. I usually end up typing my whole search as a matter of "my brain sent these words to my fingers and my fingers are going to type until they are done" kinda thing anyway, so it was a wasted feature
- unclesaamm 9y agoThe most annoying part is still there -- of the home page morphing into the search results page as soon as text is typed. It is a totally nonsensical design. 1) Type stuff into google.com 2) Delete all the text You are now on a totally empty results page. Why is this a sensible design?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- detritus 9y agoOn top of that it's a constant perplexing hindrance for Luddites like myself who insist upon using the backspace key to navigate back a page, instead leaving me wondering why my search results page is refreshing instead. Every. Single. Time. I know, I know, it's my fault. But it's not.
- mortehu 9y agoYou can also use Alt-LeftArrow, which works even if a text input field had focus.
- detritus 9y agoI know, I know :) It's just muscle memory - I've been using backspace since '97 or so.
- Sylos 9y agoDidn't Google even disable backspace to go back in Chrome somewhen last year? Or did they revert that again? And well, there's many keyboards out there with no right Alt, meaning that you have to use two hands to execute that shortcut. So, I really don't think, it's a good idea to try to force people away from using backspace, as bad of a key as it is to be using for this...
- trvr 9y agoThis isn't happening for me. Try it in incognito mode, maybe?
- EpicEng 9y agoThank God. This feature has been the bane of my Google existence. I often want to hit backspace to go back a page, but because their search bar steals my focus, I instead remove a letter or two and perform a search again. I have never, not once, found this feature to be useful. Who doesn't type faster than they can read a page of results?
- arkbyte 9y agoRemoval of instant shouldn't change the behavior of the search bar's focusing. I haven't noticed what your'e talking about, though.
- bcoates 9y agoThey have appeared to have implemented disabling instant search by simply reverting all post-instant search antifeatures: No instant search No steal focus on result page (and thus, no breaking backspace) No overriding arrow key scroll into weird blue-arrow modal UI Basically 2010 era google, all at one stroke. The result quality is still kind of meh though.
- EpicEng 9y ago@bcoates claims that it will. I assumed it would because the whole 'steal your focus' thing was implemented at the same time iirc.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Shank 9y agoLooks like I'm in the minority here, but I really liked instant. I remember turning in instant from the omnibox in chrome, too. It showed that Google was at least willing to innovate in the search space -- and for some of us, it was a huge positive to have.
- swampthinker 9y agoYeah, I usually will start my Google searches in the Omnibox, then use the search bar on the page when I needed to find something new. In those use cases, instant is incredibly useful.
- silverbax88 9y agoMan, do I hate the Omnibox with a passion. I wouldn't care so much if it wasn't the default.
- swampthinker 9y agoWhy don't you like it?
- silverbax88 9y agoI hate the idea of moving elements around the entire window after I've started using them. I don't want to use the address bar as a search bar, but the overall problem is from a UX standpoint - you start typing into a textbox, and it vanishes/moves into the address bar. That's like starting to turn a knob on a door and your hand is suddenly somewhere else, like down near the bottom of the door or near the top. It's inconsistent and disruptive. It slows down the experience. I didn't come to the page to get tossed around everywhere, I came to search for something and get off of the page as quickly as possible. And it moves the design closer to the horrible design creeping into applications today: instead of designing for every device, too many apps are designed for the worst platform, which is mobile. Capital One just redesigned their entire site for mobile, which added a lot more navigation/clicks for web users. That's just inferior design. Actually, it's not even design, it's just inferior hack layout. We live in an era where original web page design was horrible, and somehow we continue to make pages harder and harder to use. There's a pervasive myth among app designers and startups to just 'remove' functionality instead of actually delivering smart functionality. Simplifaction for ease of use is geat, but most simplification is just reducing an app to a single button and just makes real functionality harder to use. Omnibox falls into that trend. Make the search results better, get rid of spam, and stop spending even one second writing code to move the text input around inexplicably. Good design should be invisible - I shouldn't notice it. Moving elements around after I've started interacting with them is just unnecessary annoyance with no benefit to me as a user. I don't want another crappy universal search bar, which is all this is. I just want to enter a search and move to the next page, so I can try and sift through the crappily selected results Google spits out. I already know Google's results are going to be poor enough I'll have to wade through them, why slow me down up front? And so on.
- agumonkey 9y agoPoor Mayer ..
- symlinkk 9y agoThis way always a bad idea, and I imagine the excuse of "now more users are on mobile" is just there to protect Marissa Mayer's reputation. You should be able to reference the results on a search page as you type your next search.
- bbotond 9y agoI hated the "instantness" of Instant Search but loved the keyboard shortcuts which seem to have disappeared. I used TAB and the arrow keys to select a search result and Ctrl+Enter to open the result in a new tab. It is very, very sad that it is no longer possible to use those.
- bdamm 9y agoDownload and use vimium. "<esc> f" pops up a tool-tip next to every link visible, with a one or two character sequence to open that link. It is awesome. I love it. Speed boost.
- craigc 9y agoIf you use Chrome, I recommend https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jk-shortcuts-navigator/chgfodomgimhbcmlfljhkgildehakgif https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jk-shortcuts-navig... You can press j to scan forward one result and k to scan backwards and enter or command enter to jump to a result It works on a bunch of other sites too like hacker news and reddit! I am NOT the author
- alexman 9y agoYes to me it is insane that Google doesn't provide native keyboard shortcuts (at least make it an option) for the search results page. It is available on Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, etc. Why not Google search??
- archagon 9y agoOn the topic of annoying Google features, did they recently make it so that links to search results opened in new tabs? Is that a feature that one can turn off? It's eating up my iOS tabs!
- igtztorrero 9y agoI hated, thanks
- Chloro 9y agoI loved this feature! This makes me sad. It really shouldn't be a big deal to let people enable it for their own accounts or to just disable it for mobile. I don't see the benefit of just getting rid of it completely.
- kylehotchkiss 9y agoI won't miss it, I disliked searching when I found my result with partial word and see it for a split second but lose it as I finish typing the word, not reacting quickly enough. Having to backtrack character by character to find it was frustrating. I'd rather just click "search" and not have to deal with the letter by letter tweaking.
- workerIbe 9y ago'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.' I honestly cannot understand your sentiment, how can knowing something you are interested in exists be worse than not knowing at all?
- Anarch157a 9y agoInstant search was one of the reasons I moved to DuckDuckGo. Google could learn a lot from DDG. There's so many actually usefull features on the results page that now I feel lost when I'm using Google.
- koolba 9y agoDang. Now I don't have a legit excuse for pausing to view the results for NSFW prefixes of SFW search terms. Ex: sex[tant]
- EGreg 9y agoFinally! I always felt this feature was weird and abrupt.
- Upvoter33 9y agosuggestions are awesome - instant results, less so. overall, a good choice.
- czardoz 9y agoSuddenly, I can no longer navigate between results using Tab -> Arrow Up/Arrow Down. Was this removed as well? :-/
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoOh Lord - hijacking the arrow keys, which I use for page-scrolling, is one of the most annoying things ever. Kill it with fire!
- czardoz 9y agoGoogle's the only site where I prefer navigating with arrow keys, mostly because it's a list, as opposed to something like prose (where I want to take my own sweet time to read the page).
- manigandham 9y agoIt's a list of search results - why scroll when you can directly pick the result?
- MiddleEndian 9y agoIn Firefox I can hit / or ' to type the link I want and hit enter. When sites mess around with keyboard shortcuts it makes my browsing experience inconsistent and disorienting.
- manigandham 9y agoThat's a very slow and technical way but you can still do that if you want.
- MiddleEndian 9y agoI wouldn't describe it as slow. Rarely need type more than a few characters and I don't need to count.
- 9y ago
- surds 9y agoI think this feature might have helped people who are slow at typing. May be off-topic, but I remember an incidence from Home Depot when I asked a staff member to look something up for me. She pulled up a browser (think it was IE), typed google in the nav bar (perhaps to get to google.com) and got the bing search result for search term 'google'. Then she continued on to use the bing search to look for Home Depot's site (I assume she was thinking she is searching on Google). I didn't get what I was looking for, but I did leave wondering about use-case or user interaction scenarios like this that I would have never thought of. Yeah, I think that Instant Search must have had its value for people, even if not much for me.
- baalimago 9y agoi used instant search to simply see what other people search, laugh, then proceed to finding whatever i want to find by searching myself
- tannhaeuser 9y agoWhy did they drop it exactly? How does removing it makes search "more fluid on all devices" (according to TFA). I'm not complaining, but I suspect the attention bandwidth now left on the table is going to be plastered with something else soon enough.
- khana 9y agojust like that. happy news to me.
- sreeramb93 9y agoPlease drop support for google AMP or make it optional. Half of the Indian mainstream media is not available on it.
- konpikwastaken 9y agoWhenever I see "Google Instant" reference, I get always chuckle because I swear that two of my friends and I actually invented it back in '09 for a Yahoo sponsored Hackathon. I clearly remember one day logging onto my machine, going to google to search for something and just sitting there with my jaw on the ground as the "instant" feature began searching as I typed. I must've sat there for at least 5 minutes. I then proceeded to call my friends and made them go to google to "just execute a query". The response was "those motherf&kers actually ripped off our idea". I will say, while the idea was "new" (no one was doing it at the time as far as we were aware of), the hackathon code was pure garbage PHP and JS fueled by free pizza & soda and stitched together to leverage the Yahoo APIs. We went back and actually looked at our server logs (it was running a .edu/students/ site at the time as part of our portfolios) and noticed SIGNIFICANT traffic spikes from Google & MSFT registered corp IPs. Unfortunately, we figured there was nothing we could do to prove that we* invented it. Something for you to chuckle at: - Only reference I could find is a wayback link to the 2009 hackathon page ("Skynet Search" was also 'contextual' and knew if you wanted images or maps or directions without having you to make extra clicks). There used to be a blog post mention on yahoo as we got some runner-up prize. [1] - Google Instant Launched Sept 2010 [2] [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20091024035258/http://developer.yahoo.com:80/hacku/show/2009/feb/washington https://web.archive.org/web/20091024035258/http://developer.... [2] https://www.google.com/doodles/google-instant-launch https://www.google.com/doodles/google-instant-launch
- jacquesm 9y agoI had instant search on documentation files in ... 1991. And I'm fairly sure I wasn't the first to think of that either. Just because you think you think of something 'first' doesn't mean you really are the first and doesn't mean that your idea is being ripped off by others, most likely they were totally unaware of 'your' idea, just like they were unaware of mine. Most of these are obvious anyway.
- konpikwastaken 9y agoFair enough.
- ofek 9y agoDid anyone else notice they reduced the number of autocomplete fields from 10ish to 4? I really dislike this change for discoverability reasons. Is there a way to change this?
- aylmao 9y agoFinally. I completely hated how as I was typing I would change my mind and decide maybe I did want to click on a link only to see it instantly disappear. Then the back-button didn't work as expected, so I just ended up having to re-type my query. Every time.
- MrBra 9y ago> having to retype my query Especially annoying when testing multiple queries to find the optimal one and you decided that a query of 3 submissions ago was the most effective and you couldn't remember it precisely.
- user5994461 9y agoMeanwhile at google: A: "We could save hundreds of millions in hardware resources if we disabled instant search." B: "But we might lose money if we don't show as many ads. OH WAIT..." The guy did a search and realized that the suggestion menu overlaps on the top of the page, where the ads are displayed. He then tried to click the ad and he couldn't because the ad results changed the moment he moved his cursor away from the search bar. It took them 7 years to realize their mistake!
- jarnix 9y agoI was intrigued that nobody was talking about the revenue effect of the removal of Instant Search. Obviously they did it because of this.
- wfisher 9y agoI'm pretty sure they turned on Instant Search in 2010 in order to serve more ads not fewer. The extra load due to this feature was not insignificant. I heard it was the equivalent of an entire datacenter.
- pishpash 9y agoWhile we're at it, how about bringing back the search box at the bottom of the page, too?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- madisfun 9y agoGlad it's gone. Probably it's more about energy saving and DC optimization.
- CM30 9y agoGod, instant search was such a pain. So much in fact that instead of typing anything into Google when it was on, I used to type it out in Notepad or another editor and paste that into the box instead. Just found it incredibly distracting otherwise. Nice to know they've gotten rid of it.
- deftturtle 9y agoThis feature was never useful. Not to mention wasted bandwidth. Glad it's dead. Just give me simplicity.