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Instant's goal is to change user search behavior away from potentially long tail queries towards the head. If they can short circuit your potentially 4-6 word

Instant's goal is to change user search behavior away from potentially long tail queries towards the head. If they can short circuit your potentially 4-6 word specific search that has fewer and lower paying advertisers associated for a shorter, higher interest/CPC search, they stand to make a lot more money and please larger brand advertisers. That they can wrap it up to users as "decreasing search time" and "better search results" is brilliant.

moultano 16y ago
I don't understand the cynicism. Do you have any evidence for this whatsoever?
- patio11 16y ago
  He's absolutely, screamingly right. They're an advertising company. Big bang changes to the website exist to sell more advertising. Everything else they do is window dressing to make people forget that they are an advertising company.
  - moultano 16y ago
    If all Google showed were ads, no one would come to the site. Furthermore, Google is already outrageously profitable. The only real threat is if people start searching somewhere else. Do you really think they would make changes that make that more likely? Google has strong competition in Bing, Yandex, and Baidu. Even if profit were the only relevant motive, short term profitability is not something Google needs to worry about. It also seems that your argument applies to every ad supported site. Are you contending that the nytimes is in the ad business and not the news business? Is the news mere window dressing for their advertisements? If not, then how are they different from Google?
    - chc 16y ago
      That's actually a better characterization of the newspaper industry than you probably mean for it to be. From the editors' perspective, of course it's all about the news (I'm sure this is true for Google's search engineers too). But from the publisher's perspective, the news basically is some very attractive window-dressing.
      - moultano 16y ago
        True, but it's Google's search engineers that made this change, not it's ad engineers.
  - statictype 16y ago
    Everything else they do is window dressing to make people forget that they are an advertising company That's a bit disingenuous. In the same way, newspapers are also advertising companies. The journalism they do is 'window dressing'.
ryanwanger 16y ago
If they nudge people away from long tail queries, won't this mean that people will perceive the relevance of the search results to be worse? I doubt Google wants to start driving people to other search engines by making it harder for people to find what they are looking for.
- randallsquared 16y ago
  If they nudge people away from long tail queries, won't this mean that people will perceive the relevance of the search results to be worse? Only if the long tail results were better. I've sometimes gotten more relevant search results from removing keywords, even when those keywords seemed to be on the page I was looking for anyway: other pages were better ranked for those keywords, but less useful to me. I can see an argument, therefore, that presenting the intermediate results on the way to the full query could sometimes mean better results, quite apart from the advantage of getting the result you want faster.
photon_off 16y ago
Some money-making things, besides higher CPC, are highly correlated with "decreased search time" and "better search results". Mainly, the fact that Instant (to some people) makes Google their preferred search engine. I think it's a rather large claim that Instant's main purpose is to change user's search behavior. The core goal of Google, even as an advertising company, is to provide the best product: search results, and derivatively, your experience getting to those results. While what you are positing might be true, I suspect that core goal of Instant is to provide a substantial edge over Google's competitors. If I were Google right now, my main concern would be: Other search engine's results are almost as good as ours, and for the large part, "good enough." We need to maintain our competitive edge by creating the best search experience possible: fast, novel [notice more doodles lately?], and with "innovations" features that generate buzz about our edge-cutting. I'm working on a product that aims to replace Google as users' start pages. The goal has become: How can I make something that gets users to specific results faster than Google does? The answer: For a lot of things, there is no possible way. They've put so much into making their product fast and efficient, which is all you really care about when you're looking for something. I suspect Instant is just another edge they want to have over competitors in a such a valuable market. In case you're wondering about what I'm making, the goal has actually become: How can the process of searching be commodified?

moultano 16y ago

I don't understand the cynicism. Do you have any evidence for this whatsoever?

patio11 16y ago
He's absolutely, screamingly right. They're an advertising company. Big bang changes to the website exist to sell more advertising. Everything else they do is window dressing to make people forget that they are an advertising company.
- moultano 16y ago
  If all Google showed were ads, no one would come to the site. Furthermore, Google is already outrageously profitable. The only real threat is if people start searching somewhere else. Do you really think they would make changes that make that more likely? Google has strong competition in Bing, Yandex, and Baidu. Even if profit were the only relevant motive, short term profitability is not something Google needs to worry about. It also seems that your argument applies to every ad supported site. Are you contending that the nytimes is in the ad business and not the news business? Is the news mere window dressing for their advertisements? If not, then how are they different from Google?
  - chc 16y ago
    That's actually a better characterization of the newspaper industry than you probably mean for it to be. From the editors' perspective, of course it's all about the news (I'm sure this is true for Google's search engineers too). But from the publisher's perspective, the news basically is some very attractive window-dressing.
    - moultano 16y ago
      True, but it's Google's search engineers that made this change, not it's ad engineers.
- statictype 16y ago
  Everything else they do is window dressing to make people forget that they are an advertising company That's a bit disingenuous. In the same way, newspapers are also advertising companies. The journalism they do is 'window dressing'.

ryanwanger 16y ago

If they nudge people away from long tail queries, won't this mean that people will perceive the relevance of the search results to be worse? I doubt Google wants to start driving people to other search engines by making it harder for people to find what they are looking for.

randallsquared 16y ago
If they nudge people away from long tail queries, won't this mean that people will perceive the relevance of the search results to be worse? Only if the long tail results were better. I've sometimes gotten more relevant search results from removing keywords, even when those keywords seemed to be on the page I was looking for anyway: other pages were better ranked for those keywords, but less useful to me. I can see an argument, therefore, that presenting the intermediate results on the way to the full query could sometimes mean better results, quite apart from the advantage of getting the result you want faster.

photon_off 16y ago

Some money-making things, besides higher CPC, are highly correlated with "decreased search time" and "better search results". Mainly, the fact that Instant (to some people) makes Google their preferred search engine. I think it's a rather large claim that Instant's main purpose is to change user's search behavior. The core goal of Google, even as an advertising company, is to provide the best product: search results, and derivatively, your experience getting to those results. While what you are positing might be true, I suspect that core goal of Instant is to provide a substantial edge over Google's competitors. If I were Google right now, my main concern would be: Other search engine's results are almost as good as ours, and for the large part, "good enough." We need to maintain our competitive edge by creating the best search experience possible: fast, novel [notice more doodles lately?], and with "innovations" features that generate buzz about our edge-cutting. I'm working on a product that aims to replace Google as users' start pages. The goal has become: How can I make something that gets users to specific results faster than Google does? The answer: For a lot of things, there is no possible way. They've put so much into making their product fast and efficient, which is all you really care about when you're looking for something. I suspect Instant is just another edge they want to have over competitors in a such a valuable market. In case you're wondering about what I'm making, the goal has actually become: How can the process of searching be commodified?