13 ms·

I'm sorry, but this is a solution to the wrong problem. I switched from AltaVista to Google back in 1998, not because their search engine returned results more

by mrshoe 16y ago

I'm sorry, but this is a solution to the wrong problem. I switched from AltaVista to Google back in 1998, not because their search engine returned results more quickly, but because their results were much more relevant. In the past few years, SEOs have set up micro-sites on just about any topic I could possibly search for and they've managed to rank highly for those topics. Am I the only one who's sick of being taken to these shallow landing pages smothered in ads? Does anyone else think Google's search results are now far less relevant than they were 5 years ago? I don't need search results that update live as I type. I need to find what I'm looking for.

AlexC04 16y ago
You've really hit the nail right on the head for exactly what I've been feeling some sort of odd, decentralized anxiety about for a while. While reading your comment I realized that was the problem. Google kinda sucks now because of people gaming the system. But who else is out there? I'd probably switch my search if I knew where else to try.
- laktek 16y ago
  Maybe to duckduckgo.com ?
  - AlexC04 16y ago
    i'll try it for a week and see how it feels. :)
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- josefresco 16y ago
  Use Bing, or DDG. A healthy search market means SEO companies have to target two (or more, go DDG!) set of somewhat unique rules which makes it harder to game. The fact that Google dominates means there's one playbook for most SEO. Bing (or anyone) could really make some ground if they tackled the low quality content SPAM market as opposed to simply trying to be as close to Google as possible so people will switch. How about some direct ads showing spammy searches at Google compared with clean results at ....
ugh 16y ago
Google is a large company. I’m pretty sure that they have a lot of people working on search quality. This seems like a popular fallacy (Does it have a name?), probably a result of anthropomorphising companies. It’s hard for a human to solve more than one problem at once and if they do they have naturally less time for each problem. Sure, there can be similar effects in companies but it’s certainly not inevitable, not as inevitable as with humans, anyway. We just don‘t know whether improvements in search quality suffered because of this new feature. It doesn’t strike me as something search quality people would typically work on, though.
- treeface 16y ago
  It's called a false dichotomy or a false dilemma: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
neilk 16y ago
Your own perception of why you switched may be partially in error. Google has done a lot of research to show that speed matters quite a lot to users. When results appear in less than 250ms the user is much more satisfied than even 500ms. Anything less than a quarter of a second is thought of as "instantaneous" and the user starts thinking of it very differently. Here, they are taking it down to less than 100ms, which is now operating faster than the user can even perceive (for that matter, it's faster than many users can type). So the real effect is that they have now eliminated the need to click on "Search". So now Google is even more interwoven into your thought processes, and other search engines are going to seem unbearably slow pretty soon.
- nanairo 16y ago
  True. But you'll have to agree that such argument have a diminishing marginal return pattern. 500ms vs. 250ms may be great, but what about 100ms vs. 50ms? Once you reach the point my brain is the bottleneck, what's the point? On the other hand it could be distracting to get something happening in the screen while you are thinking the best way to form your query. Usually when I am about to ask someone a question and that person tries to give me the answer much before I have finished, it can get a bit annoying. So I am not convinced this change in speed will bring much benefit, and it risk (from the sound of it) to be distracting. However this is just my gut feeling. I'll still give it a try, and I am sure other people will have different opinions. It's good to see Google trying to improve the search interface in any case.
  - daychilde 16y ago
    The nice thing, though, is that there's an option to turn it off for those that don't like it. I'm not sure if it'll prove to be too distracting vs. mildly helpful for me, yet.
  - kwamenum86 16y ago
    Experiments have shown that 100 Ms is the threshold.
    - 16y ago
Experimentalist 16y ago
I have to disagree. The "micro-sites" you are talking about, and the long-tail SEO people are complaining about, are nothing new at all. It's been common for SEOs to build and rank sites like that for at least 5+ years. The difference is Google made a big change to it's search algo back in April and in my opinion it was for the worse. It actually ranked bigger sites (bigger than micro-sites but not necessarily the biggest ones) higher for less relevant long tail searches, presumably to weed out the micro-sites. So the difference between now and 2 years ago is you are getting a less relevant result list, not that you are getting an SEOd micro-site. I have a medium-sized website which relies mostly on long tail SE traffic, Contrary to what many are posting here about this hurting sites that rely on long tail-- my traffic is above normal today. I'm not seeing a decline due to this search change. I also would not see it in Google's interest to have less long tail searches, since those tend to earn it more money.
- josefresco 16y ago
  I think the damage to long tail searches was already dealt long ago when Google started auto-complete on the home page and before that when people started using a Firefox search bar. Auto-results only makes things faster. This strikes me as very AOLish where people are encouraged to search for what everyone else is (aka AOL Keyword) as opposed to having access to the entire web, unfiltered.
mtholking 16y ago
Agreed. Instead of getting users to better results and having them click through to the site, Google Instant seems to want the user to keep asking different questions until the answer is available in page title and abstract that Google presents.
thaumaturgy 16y ago
Yeah, funny you should mention that. One of my techs is on a job site and just called in requesting documentation for an older Avaya phone system. Googling for it was a complete waste of time. (Unfortunately, DDG couldn't fare much better.) I find this is often the case when searching for "long tail" terms, like specific models of equipment. There are tons and tons of sites like this (http://camera.manualsonline.com/ex/mfg/headline/m/avaya/type/manual_request http://camera.manualsonline.com/ex/mfg/headline/m/avaya/type...) at the top of the search results. (Edit: And while we're at it, trying to find information on obscure error messages or documentation for software is at least as frustrating, but for a whole other reason: so many of the results are forum posts from years ago discussing an obsolete version of the software or error conditions that are no longer relevant. For a more specific example, we recently had an OpenSolaris server refuse to boot with the very helpful "Error 16" message; the only thing we could find were references to an out-of-date BIOS problem that no longer applies.) Google is drifting very, very far from what they set out to do 11 years ago, IMO.
- smiler 16y ago
  I do wish there was a human curated search engine. Eg everytime you search for something and you find a useless spam site, you can flag it and then it's removed from the search. I'm sure something like that must exist already - does anyone know?
  - sunir 16y ago
    Google tried this. It was called SearchWiki. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-search-your-own.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-searc...
    - nostrademons 16y ago
      Or was called SearchWiki. It turned out that nobody liked or used it, so it was removed.
      - 16y ago
fbnt 16y ago
Agreed. Seems to me that they're just trying to inflate the number of adwords impressions this way, and not helping me in any way with my search. And it's utterly distracting too. Excuse the negativity.
- jedc 16y ago
  Why would inflating the number of impressions matter at all when Google makes money from clicks?
  - fbnt 16y ago
    Probability of some old man clicking one of the four different links kindly proposed on the top of the page by Google while he's typing his search query is higher than the probability of him clicking the only ad shown to him with the old search technique. I guess.
    - EricBurnett 16y ago
      Even if that were true, then the value of clicks would decrease, prices would drop, and a new balance would be achieved.
      - gojomo 16y ago
        But in the weeks or months before bidding behavior adjusts downward -- pure gravy for Google!
        dustrider 16y ago
        I doubt that they did this for a short term (weeks of gravy) gain. I also don't think that it's a case of increasing impressions. I do however think that it allows them to display more ads, and therefore increases the chances of an ad being relevant, and as a result more clicks. Because you're now getting accustomed to the results changing as you type, having different ads appear as you complete your query is not more obtrusive than the core function. As an example, searching for employment tribunal brought up about 5-6 different ads (just in the main results area, not counting the sidebar) whereas without instant, their inventory is limited to three. I would say that where there are multiple options to a character sequence it gives them better value per ad as well as they can pick the ads that are worth more, until of course the character sequence excludes them. So in the end, you've got increased inventory and better value per ad for Google, increased speed and responses to users. Win-win Though there are more than two parties in the search ecosystem, the tail-optimised sites are going to be left out in the cold, not necessarily the small ones, but anything that relies on 2nd page or below the fold traffic. This may or may not be a good thing for the internet, but it's going to hurt a lot of companies. By the way, not sure if anyone else has noticed this, but it's got a definite sense of history enabled as well, with subsequent queries for the same terms being much quicker to latch onto the directions chose in previous instances.
josefresco 16y ago
I switched from AltaVista because it was better AND faster. In the late 90's my Internet connection sucked and Google's lightweight home page helped. Yahoo! as I remember had already gone the way of the full portal experience which meant Google became the site for searching (Yahoo! for Chat/Email/Games). The good results at Google kept me there which reinforces your point.
slowpoison 16y ago
Personally, you can always turn it off. It is probably useful for other people.
aik 16y ago
I live in Sydney and used DDG for a while, but mainly switched because Google returns noticeably faster for me and I noticed I became frustrated when waiting for DDG.
moron4hire 16y ago
Given that "optimization" has a positive connotation in tech fields, I suggest that we rename SEO to PRE: PageRank Exploitation.
- dedward 16y ago
  Unless you're on the business end of things and most of your new customers come from search engines - in which case optimizing your site, which offers the products people are actually searching for, to the top of the list (and aren't cheating with giant link-farms....). Good SEO has a lower CPA than just about any other kind of marketing. Now, if we're talking about SEO where people are link-farming to spam pages just to get ad-hits and get ad revenue and other spammy behavior of no real value to anyone but the person doing the SEO.....i'm all for hte new classification.
edanm 16y ago
"I don't need search results that update live as I type. I need to find what I'm looking for." You need to find what you're looking for faster. For you, that only means more relevant results, since (this is a guess) you're a quick typist. For slower typists, this kind of instant search could save a lot more than 500ms. It can save them 30 seconds, maybe even a minute. It might also help teach people how to search. There's obviously some "art" to choosing the right search phrase, and this kind of "search as you type" can help people learn by doing in a way that's much better than before.
- dedward 16y ago
  Even for fast typists - speed and response time affects your perception of the site subconsciously. The faster and more realtime it seems the more you are going to like it, even if you aren't sure why, or don't even think about it. You may not even realize why if asked why you like it better - but the statistics and studies are there and are solid - so this is likely a very good move on google's part.
  - uxp 16y ago
    The first few searches I queried google for this morning didn't have this instantaneous result feature. This afternoon, it did, but I didn't notice it until I actually became frustrated when I would change a query and click "search", and the results didn't change. It took me a minute to actually notice how the results were dynamically changing under me. It may take a day or more to get used to, but it really does speed up the workflow.
dedward 16y ago
You're assuming they were solving a different problem. Have you switched to a new search engine? If not, it's more likely (statistically) that you will stay with google longer because of this new feature - it's now faster and easier to mine through search data. Agreed it doesn't solve the search-spam problem - but nobody claimed it did.
tolmasky 16y ago
Faster results may mean better results in an indirect way. If you accept that some searches will require multiple tries before getting what you want, then If you can see the quality of your search results as you type, you can get to what you want faster. Of course you may disagree with that premise.
patana 16y ago
You say that this the the wrong problem because you know what you are looking for. But think for a moment, there are lots of people who will put a name in the browser and obtain a lot of queries of people like them. So for people that are curious and like hearing rumours this is a nice tool. Just an example: What's new about sex? Sex ....... (imagine the top suggestions) What's new about my favourite singer? What's new about my best enemy? You .....................

by mrshoe 16y ago

AlexC04 16y ago

You've really hit the nail right on the head for exactly what I've been feeling some sort of odd, decentralized anxiety about for a while. While reading your comment I realized that was the problem. Google kinda sucks now because of people gaming the system. But who else is out there? I'd probably switch my search if I knew where else to try.

laktek 16y ago
Maybe to duckduckgo.com ?
- AlexC04 16y ago
  i'll try it for a week and see how it feels. :)
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
josefresco 16y ago
Use Bing, or DDG. A healthy search market means SEO companies have to target two (or more, go DDG!) set of somewhat unique rules which makes it harder to game. The fact that Google dominates means there's one playbook for most SEO. Bing (or anyone) could really make some ground if they tackled the low quality content SPAM market as opposed to simply trying to be as close to Google as possible so people will switch. How about some direct ads showing spammy searches at Google compared with clean results at ....

ugh 16y ago

Google is a large company. I’m pretty sure that they have a lot of people working on search quality. This seems like a popular fallacy (Does it have a name?), probably a result of anthropomorphising companies. It’s hard for a human to solve more than one problem at once and if they do they have naturally less time for each problem. Sure, there can be similar effects in companies but it’s certainly not inevitable, not as inevitable as with humans, anyway. We just don‘t know whether improvements in search quality suffered because of this new feature. It doesn’t strike me as something search quality people would typically work on, though.

treeface 16y ago
It's called a false dichotomy or a false dilemma: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

neilk 16y ago

Your own perception of why you switched may be partially in error. Google has done a lot of research to show that speed matters quite a lot to users. When results appear in less than 250ms the user is much more satisfied than even 500ms. Anything less than a quarter of a second is thought of as "instantaneous" and the user starts thinking of it very differently. Here, they are taking it down to less than 100ms, which is now operating faster than the user can even perceive (for that matter, it's faster than many users can type). So the real effect is that they have now eliminated the need to click on "Search". So now Google is even more interwoven into your thought processes, and other search engines are going to seem unbearably slow pretty soon.

nanairo 16y ago
True. But you'll have to agree that such argument have a diminishing marginal return pattern. 500ms vs. 250ms may be great, but what about 100ms vs. 50ms? Once you reach the point my brain is the bottleneck, what's the point? On the other hand it could be distracting to get something happening in the screen while you are thinking the best way to form your query. Usually when I am about to ask someone a question and that person tries to give me the answer much before I have finished, it can get a bit annoying. So I am not convinced this change in speed will bring much benefit, and it risk (from the sound of it) to be distracting. However this is just my gut feeling. I'll still give it a try, and I am sure other people will have different opinions. It's good to see Google trying to improve the search interface in any case.
- daychilde 16y ago
  The nice thing, though, is that there's an option to turn it off for those that don't like it. I'm not sure if it'll prove to be too distracting vs. mildly helpful for me, yet.
- kwamenum86 16y ago
  Experiments have shown that 100 Ms is the threshold.
  - 16y ago

Experimentalist 16y ago

I have to disagree. The "micro-sites" you are talking about, and the long-tail SEO people are complaining about, are nothing new at all. It's been common for SEOs to build and rank sites like that for at least 5+ years. The difference is Google made a big change to it's search algo back in April and in my opinion it was for the worse. It actually ranked bigger sites (bigger than micro-sites but not necessarily the biggest ones) higher for less relevant long tail searches, presumably to weed out the micro-sites. So the difference between now and 2 years ago is you are getting a less relevant result list, not that you are getting an SEOd micro-site. I have a medium-sized website which relies mostly on long tail SE traffic, Contrary to what many are posting here about this hurting sites that rely on long tail-- my traffic is above normal today. I'm not seeing a decline due to this search change. I also would not see it in Google's interest to have less long tail searches, since those tend to earn it more money.

josefresco 16y ago
I think the damage to long tail searches was already dealt long ago when Google started auto-complete on the home page and before that when people started using a Firefox search bar. Auto-results only makes things faster. This strikes me as very AOLish where people are encouraged to search for what everyone else is (aka AOL Keyword) as opposed to having access to the entire web, unfiltered.

mtholking 16y ago

Agreed. Instead of getting users to better results and having them click through to the site, Google Instant seems to want the user to keep asking different questions until the answer is available in page title and abstract that Google presents.

thaumaturgy 16y ago

Yeah, funny you should mention that. One of my techs is on a job site and just called in requesting documentation for an older Avaya phone system. Googling for it was a complete waste of time. (Unfortunately, DDG couldn't fare much better.) I find this is often the case when searching for "long tail" terms, like specific models of equipment. There are tons and tons of sites like this (http://camera.manualsonline.com/ex/mfg/headline/m/avaya/type/manual_request http://camera.manualsonline.com/ex/mfg/headline/m/avaya/type...) at the top of the search results. (Edit: And while we're at it, trying to find information on obscure error messages or documentation for software is at least as frustrating, but for a whole other reason: so many of the results are forum posts from years ago discussing an obsolete version of the software or error conditions that are no longer relevant. For a more specific example, we recently had an OpenSolaris server refuse to boot with the very helpful "Error 16" message; the only thing we could find were references to an out-of-date BIOS problem that no longer applies.) Google is drifting very, very far from what they set out to do 11 years ago, IMO.

smiler 16y ago
I do wish there was a human curated search engine. Eg everytime you search for something and you find a useless spam site, you can flag it and then it's removed from the search. I'm sure something like that must exist already - does anyone know?
- sunir 16y ago
  Google tried this. It was called SearchWiki. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-search-your-own.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-searc...
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    Or was called SearchWiki. It turned out that nobody liked or used it, so it was removed.
    - 16y ago

fbnt 16y ago

Agreed. Seems to me that they're just trying to inflate the number of adwords impressions this way, and not helping me in any way with my search. And it's utterly distracting too. Excuse the negativity.

jedc 16y ago
Why would inflating the number of impressions matter at all when Google makes money from clicks?
- fbnt 16y ago
  Probability of some old man clicking one of the four different links kindly proposed on the top of the page by Google while he's typing his search query is higher than the probability of him clicking the only ad shown to him with the old search technique. I guess.
  - EricBurnett 16y ago
    Even if that were true, then the value of clicks would decrease, prices would drop, and a new balance would be achieved.
    - gojomo 16y ago
      But in the weeks or months before bidding behavior adjusts downward -- pure gravy for Google!
      - dustrider 16y ago
        I doubt that they did this for a short term (weeks of gravy) gain. I also don't think that it's a case of increasing impressions. I do however think that it allows them to display more ads, and therefore increases the chances of an ad being relevant, and as a result more clicks. Because you're now getting accustomed to the results changing as you type, having different ads appear as you complete your query is not more obtrusive than the core function. As an example, searching for employment tribunal brought up about 5-6 different ads (just in the main results area, not counting the sidebar) whereas without instant, their inventory is limited to three. I would say that where there are multiple options to a character sequence it gives them better value per ad as well as they can pick the ads that are worth more, until of course the character sequence excludes them. So in the end, you've got increased inventory and better value per ad for Google, increased speed and responses to users. Win-win Though there are more than two parties in the search ecosystem, the tail-optimised sites are going to be left out in the cold, not necessarily the small ones, but anything that relies on 2nd page or below the fold traffic. This may or may not be a good thing for the internet, but it's going to hurt a lot of companies. By the way, not sure if anyone else has noticed this, but it's got a definite sense of history enabled as well, with subsequent queries for the same terms being much quicker to latch onto the directions chose in previous instances.

josefresco 16y ago

I switched from AltaVista because it was better AND faster. In the late 90's my Internet connection sucked and Google's lightweight home page helped. Yahoo! as I remember had already gone the way of the full portal experience which meant Google became the site for searching (Yahoo! for Chat/Email/Games). The good results at Google kept me there which reinforces your point.

slowpoison 16y ago

Personally, you can always turn it off. It is probably useful for other people.

aik 16y ago

I live in Sydney and used DDG for a while, but mainly switched because Google returns noticeably faster for me and I noticed I became frustrated when waiting for DDG.

moron4hire 16y ago

Given that "optimization" has a positive connotation in tech fields, I suggest that we rename SEO to PRE: PageRank Exploitation.

dedward 16y ago
Unless you're on the business end of things and most of your new customers come from search engines - in which case optimizing your site, which offers the products people are actually searching for, to the top of the list (and aren't cheating with giant link-farms....). Good SEO has a lower CPA than just about any other kind of marketing. Now, if we're talking about SEO where people are link-farming to spam pages just to get ad-hits and get ad revenue and other spammy behavior of no real value to anyone but the person doing the SEO.....i'm all for hte new classification.

edanm 16y ago

"I don't need search results that update live as I type. I need to find what I'm looking for." You need to find what you're looking for faster. For you, that only means more relevant results, since (this is a guess) you're a quick typist. For slower typists, this kind of instant search could save a lot more than 500ms. It can save them 30 seconds, maybe even a minute. It might also help teach people how to search. There's obviously some "art" to choosing the right search phrase, and this kind of "search as you type" can help people learn by doing in a way that's much better than before.

dedward 16y ago
Even for fast typists - speed and response time affects your perception of the site subconsciously. The faster and more realtime it seems the more you are going to like it, even if you aren't sure why, or don't even think about it. You may not even realize why if asked why you like it better - but the statistics and studies are there and are solid - so this is likely a very good move on google's part.
- uxp 16y ago
  The first few searches I queried google for this morning didn't have this instantaneous result feature. This afternoon, it did, but I didn't notice it until I actually became frustrated when I would change a query and click "search", and the results didn't change. It took me a minute to actually notice how the results were dynamically changing under me. It may take a day or more to get used to, but it really does speed up the workflow.

dedward 16y ago

You're assuming they were solving a different problem. Have you switched to a new search engine? If not, it's more likely (statistically) that you will stay with google longer because of this new feature - it's now faster and easier to mine through search data. Agreed it doesn't solve the search-spam problem - but nobody claimed it did.

tolmasky 16y ago

Faster results may mean better results in an indirect way. If you accept that some searches will require multiple tries before getting what you want, then If you can see the quality of your search results as you type, you can get to what you want faster. Of course you may disagree with that premise.

patana 16y ago

You say that this the the wrong problem because you know what you are looking for. But think for a moment, there are lots of people who will put a name in the browser and obtain a lot of queries of people like them. So for people that are curious and like hearing rumours this is a nice tool. Just an example: What's new about sex? Sex ....... (imagine the top suggestions) What's new about my favourite singer? What's new about my best enemy? You .....................