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The funny thing about the "instant" search is around the time of AJAX exploding four or five years ago, this type of "real-time" search was all the rage. Over t

The funny thing about the "instant" search is around the time of AJAX exploding four or five years ago, this type of "real-time" search was all the rage. Over time it disappeared, most likely because it both wastes resources and a lot of users found it annoying. From that, auto-complete suggestions was the next evolution. Now we seem to have gone full circle. As impressive as it is that they're handling way more searches than before with lightning speed, the whole thing seems really naff. The marketing video for Google Instant in particular is hilarious - "I don't even have to press Enter!" I work for Nokia and we used to have "real-time search" on Ovi Maps and this was removed around a year ago, again due to a confusing and poor user experience. After all this buzz I saw some people on the internal communication tools ask if we have the technology internally to do instance geosearch. Marketing is everything.

Amanjeev 16y ago
Yes and I hate marketing. It is not the true way a true innovation or innovator can get credit. It is just a bunch of fat men, sucking on the wet end of their cigars, choosing to show what they want with the power of their money.
cmurphycode 16y ago
This is a classic engineer response. It's not about who does it first, it's about who does it right. We didn't have the technology to implement this properly 5 years ago. I've never seen the Ovi Maps tool you mention, but I'm willing to bet that it wasn't polished enough to make it natural for users. Now, I'm not entirely convinced that Google Instant is polished enough either- anecdotally, I've already seen some confusion. But saying "it's all marketing" willfully ignores the lesson we've all been taught by Apple: a revolutionary feature that isn't intuitively usable is no revolutionary feature at all.
- DavidMcLaughlin 16y ago
  Actually, to me it seems like the real lesson most companies are picking up from Apple is to grossly overstate every little thing they do in the name of hype and buzz. I mean, revolutionary feature? Seriously? My whole point is this revolution happened five years ago and people learnt their lesson and moved on. I'm sure a lot of developers will be asked to put this back in, but on the plus side if you're not dealing with Google scale it's a trivial thing to implement.
  - jessriedel 16y ago
    I think you guys are talking past each other. Your claim is that, if Google Instant is successful, it will be because of marketing/hype/some-other-non-technical-reason. His claim is that it will be because Google made the feature (which everyone agrees existed in a basic form 5 years ago) accessible to the average user. I don't think you guys are going to be able to settle this debate without some data about real life users.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
  - cmurphycode 16y ago
    There's always a chicken-before-the-egg argument with companies like Apple. Do people love using their products because of their marketing, or is their marketing effective because people love using their products? I think it's naive to say the former. Apple posted 3 billion dollars in profit last quarter. If all Nokia had to do to post those numbers was grossly overstate every feature in their phones (which should be easy, there are so many), they'd probably be doing it. The thing that really bugs me about this is that personally, as a DIY techie, I actually like the power-user oriented nature of the Nokia phones a lot more than the iPhone (at least, at first, when the iPhone was hopelessly feature-barren). I probably would've really liked your real time search! But I'm not arguing about what I want from a product. I'm arguing about what the majority of people want.
photon_off 16y ago
I'd have to disagree that "marketing" is what accounts for the pattern of Google leading web technologies into ubiquity. I think the very precise engineering they put into making a great product, then the massive user adoption that follows, is what allows for other websites to use similar technologies with confidence. In other words, the fact that Google implements something gives that implementation both massive social proof, and user familiarity. Granted, it's not all about engineering and a huge user base. If you replaced the word "marketing" with "buzz," I would tend to agree with you. If there's one thing that's become apparent to me recently, it's that nearly any idea, product, person, place, tv show, etc, can be validated by generating a shitstorm of buzz about it. I suspect there's some reptilian instinct that changes the way we view things if we see others accepting it, and media attention, though often a misrepresentation, does the trick. For companies like Google and Apple, buzz is almost too easy.

Amanjeev 16y ago

Yes and I hate marketing. It is not the true way a true innovation or innovator can get credit. It is just a bunch of fat men, sucking on the wet end of their cigars, choosing to show what they want with the power of their money.

cmurphycode 16y ago

This is a classic engineer response. It's not about who does it first, it's about who does it right. We didn't have the technology to implement this properly 5 years ago. I've never seen the Ovi Maps tool you mention, but I'm willing to bet that it wasn't polished enough to make it natural for users. Now, I'm not entirely convinced that Google Instant is polished enough either- anecdotally, I've already seen some confusion. But saying "it's all marketing" willfully ignores the lesson we've all been taught by Apple: a revolutionary feature that isn't intuitively usable is no revolutionary feature at all.

DavidMcLaughlin 16y ago
Actually, to me it seems like the real lesson most companies are picking up from Apple is to grossly overstate every little thing they do in the name of hype and buzz. I mean, revolutionary feature? Seriously? My whole point is this revolution happened five years ago and people learnt their lesson and moved on. I'm sure a lot of developers will be asked to put this back in, but on the plus side if you're not dealing with Google scale it's a trivial thing to implement.
- jessriedel 16y ago
  I think you guys are talking past each other. Your claim is that, if Google Instant is successful, it will be because of marketing/hype/some-other-non-technical-reason. His claim is that it will be because Google made the feature (which everyone agrees existed in a basic form 5 years ago) accessible to the average user. I don't think you guys are going to be able to settle this debate without some data about real life users.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- cmurphycode 16y ago
  There's always a chicken-before-the-egg argument with companies like Apple. Do people love using their products because of their marketing, or is their marketing effective because people love using their products? I think it's naive to say the former. Apple posted 3 billion dollars in profit last quarter. If all Nokia had to do to post those numbers was grossly overstate every feature in their phones (which should be easy, there are so many), they'd probably be doing it. The thing that really bugs me about this is that personally, as a DIY techie, I actually like the power-user oriented nature of the Nokia phones a lot more than the iPhone (at least, at first, when the iPhone was hopelessly feature-barren). I probably would've really liked your real time search! But I'm not arguing about what I want from a product. I'm arguing about what the majority of people want.

photon_off 16y ago

I'd have to disagree that "marketing" is what accounts for the pattern of Google leading web technologies into ubiquity. I think the very precise engineering they put into making a great product, then the massive user adoption that follows, is what allows for other websites to use similar technologies with confidence. In other words, the fact that Google implements something gives that implementation both massive social proof, and user familiarity. Granted, it's not all about engineering and a huge user base. If you replaced the word "marketing" with "buzz," I would tend to agree with you. If there's one thing that's become apparent to me recently, it's that nearly any idea, product, person, place, tv show, etc, can be validated by generating a shitstorm of buzz about it. I suspect there's some reptilian instinct that changes the way we view things if we see others accepting it, and media attention, though often a misrepresentation, does the trick. For companies like Google and Apple, buzz is almost too easy.