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In 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.
by amichail 16y ago
In 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.