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Google Instant, behind the scenes
- amichail 16y agoIn user studies, people quickly found a new way to interact with Google: type until the gray text matches your intention and then move your eyes to the results. We were actually surprised at how well this worked—most people in our studies didn’t even notice that anything had changed. Google was just faster. If this is the case, then what's the point of showing the search results as the user types? It seems that just having predictions is sufficient.
- ugh 16y agoThey tested that: For example, we tried a prototype where we waited for someone to stop typing before showing results, which did not work. We realized the experience needed to be fast to work well.
- amichail 16y agoCursor down + return is pretty fast.
- ugh 16y agoIt’s never fast enough until people can’t tell the difference. “Pretty fast” is meaningless in that context. What matters is whether it is perceptibly faster or slower.
- amichail 16y agoI think the real issue is something that Google is not telling us. Maybe most people can't figure out they can press cursor down + return. Or maybe this is a flashy way to distinguish their product from the competition. Or maybe this is a way to encourage users to use shorter queries (as they can see how effective they are from the search results), thus forcing advertisers to pay more for more general terms.
- ugh 16y agoI vote “people can't figure out they can press cursor down + return.” And that’s a perfectly good reason for changing the UI.
- jey 16y agoEven those who can figure it out probably benefit from fewer necessary steps, allowing them to pay less attention to the process of searching and more attention to the content.
- Twisol 16y agoI actually like Google Instant a lot. If I don't know exactly what I'm looking for - lets say I'm looking up some obscure HRESULT error handling thing, which I was - I can basically play with my query in real-time. It makes it much faster to do this kind of digging.
- mkelly 16y agoIt's kind of like a REPL for your search queries. Kinda.
- SkyMarshal 16y agoIs that what amichail is asking? It sounds like he's wondering why they don't just show the results updating with every letter you type, while not even bothering to show the dropdown predictive list of queries you may be typing.
- mkelly 16y agoOne qualitative difference: the "I'm feeling lucky" button (which you can use if you hit right-arrow on a search suggestion) has actually become useful. You can start typing, scroll down to an entry you like, and check the snippet of the top result -- all without clicking any buttons. This is a pretty big deal to people like me who go to great lengths to avoid using the mouse. I've not tried it much because I don't usually search from the google homepage, but maybe I'll try it now.
- brown9-2 16y agoAnyone else curious how long those 50 person stand-up meetings took?
- smhinsey 16y agoEven by the scrum ideal of <1 minute per person, that's longer than most traditional "status meetings." Must've been loads of fun.
- nostrademons 16y agoThe couple I sat in for were 10ish minutes (I think the NBC Nightly News segment has a program manager saying "Alright, 12 minutes"). They were done so that each team reported to their team lead what they were working on beforehand, and then at the scrum, the team leads aggregated everything that was going on with their team.
- smhinsey 16y agoMakes sense. Few scrum teams get that large where you need to start thinking about optimizations like that.
- rozim 16y agoThey were tightly run and limited to 15m minutes. Usually only team leads talked and there wasn't much back and forth. It's more normal at Google to have fewer people and 30 or 60 minute mtgs.
- mrtron 16y agoGoogle Instant is shockingly fast. It is hard to imagine a small startup creating it and having it work for a few beta users. Even harder to imagine Google scaling up their infrastructure 10-fold.
- moultano 16y agoWhat this is really showing is how fast the underlying infrastructure already was. It had been optimized to the point that it really couldn't get any faster without speeding up the user themselves, so they did that.
- loire280 16y agoI, for one, forget to appreciate the fact that one of the fastest web apps I regularly use is the one that searches the entire* internet. *kinda
- moultano 16y agoThe internet that Google doesn't search is almost always not the internet you want to find. :)
- ugh 16y agoI would still love to get a good layman’s explanation of how Google and other search engines can be so fast. I’m not a developer but I know a few basic concepts. Sorting makes searching fast – but that fast? I can imagine that if I’m searching for “ball” Google already has the PageRank sorted results somewhere on its servers. That seems easy enough. But what about arbitrary search terms? Searching for “tango durlast 1978” (a soccer ball) gives me results just as fast, does Google have all of that pre-computed somewhere? If they did that (to pick an arbitrary number) for search terms up to 100 characters (say all 26 letters, ten digits and space) that would mean that they would have to have something like 37^100=6.6e+156 pre-computed lists of results somewhere on their servers. That can’t be what they are doing. If they were to use only one byte per possible search term (to pick another arbitrary and completely ridiculous number) they would still need to store 6.6e+144 terabyte. Which seems kinda impossible.
- shaggy 16y agoI think the most interesting piece of that article is that they are caching per user results. So not only have they made result display dynamic, but they've made the performance unique to everyone using the system.
- SanjayUttam 16y agoThat's not much of a "behind the scenes". Granted, this is still rather impressive. Would love to get more technical details on it.
- extension 16y agoI'm amazed that users couldn't tell the qualitative difference between submitting a form and find-as-you-type. To a hacker, AJAX is a whole other experience but to Joe User, it's just a bit faster. It's something to keep in mind if your AJAX interface isn't actually faster. Yet another unconscious programmer assumption shattered.
- boredguy8 16y agoThey capture my keyboard after I search from the menu bar of Chrome, so I can't hit backspace to return to the previous page. Even if I click outside of the box, any Google search page redirects my backspace into the search box, which also changes the results. It's rather quite annoying.
- pak 16y agoMy issue is I almost always search from the address bar of chrome, or the search box of any other browser, so I never see the "instant" effect. I can't remember the last time I actually went to google.com except when linked to see a cool logo design.
- randallsquared 16y agoYeah, they broke one of my search patterns: search for something, read the answer from the results. I do this almost as much as following any of the results, because for a quick answer to a question the answer is usually in the summary of the link. Now, however, I open a new tab, google loads, I type the question and hit Enter, and when I CMD-W to close the tab, Safari stops me to ask if I'm really sure I want to do this. This seems like such a tiny thing while I'm writing it down, now, but it's frustrated me steadily today; I've context-switched out of whatever I was thinking about more than a dozen times to figure out why I was getting a popup warning. Finally I just turned it off in search settings. The barely-noticeable increase in speed just isn't worth it.
- samlittlewood 16y agoI would have loved to be a fly on the wall at Microsoft when someone said - 'That's weird, have you tried google today?' I assume some of the ajaxy Google logos have been leading up to this - especially the one that coloured in the letters as you typed.