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There's a risk that Instant won't enhance the search experience for most users significantly, but it won't make it worse. That's not much of a risk.

borism 16y ago
there's always risk, the question is - how do you measure risk/reward ratio.
nostrademons 16y ago
When Instant was under development, we had an office pool for "How long will it be before Instant is rolled back, and why?", and two of the most popular answers were "2 days - user revolt" and "1 month - global search outage". Of course, anyone who voted there has egg on their face now because it was a successful launch with relatively few problems, which is mostly a credit to the teams involved and the hard work they put in to foresee problems and fix them before launch. But things looked very, very different when the product was still iterating, the UI wasn't worked out, and there was significant doubt that it would be physically possible to do it. It's very easy to look at a product in hindsight and say "Duh, that's obvious, of course it's a good idea, why didn't anyone do it sooner?" It's much harder to take a random idea that's been batted around a few times and say definitively "This is a good idea that we can and must do."
- bmm6o 16y ago
  There wasn't user revolt, but is Instant widely regarded as a success? I find it mildly annoying myself, but maybe I'm in the minority.
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    By public comments, help forum feedback, and press reaction, it was perhaps Google's most successful search launch ever, and certainly within the last year or two. I personally find it mildly annoying too, but I'm apparently in the minority.
- moultano 16y ago
  Just watching that process from a distance internally was a good lesson for me in product development. Normally I'd expect that if an idea is generally good, people will kinda like the first version, until after gradual iteration eventually they love it. For some things, that's just not true. With the iterations of Instant over months, I saw coworkers go from "argh I hate this I hope it never launches" to "wow, this is cool." They spent most of that time hating it, and only started to like it once it was near perfect. It wasn't a gradual switchover from "meh" to "awesome." It was a sudden shift from "HATE" to "WOW."
  - davi 16y ago
    This is really interesting: certain kinds of features and projects suck until they're good. A steeply sloped sigmoid of suckage. Why did the people working on Instant persevere despite their coworkers' reactions? Was it because they had a clear end-vision of awesomeness, and they knew they just hadn't implemented to that point yet? Or was it more intuitive, a sense that there was awesomeness somewhere in parameter space, and that they could get there with continued iteration?
    - nostrademons 16y ago
      It's actually more interesting than that: several of the key people working on the project believed it was impossible and could never succeed. The short answer to your question is "because Larry and Sergey really wanted it". It's amazing how much attention projects that the founders are personally interested in get. That would be very misleading, though, because it's not like anyone was forced to work on Instant, nor is the typical Googler a mindless automaton who always does what he's told. Everyone who worked on Instant was there because they wanted to work on Instant, even the ones who felt it didn't have a prayer of success. The longer answer is that Google's created a culture that tolerates ambiguity remarkably well. Y'know how they say that it's a sign of intelligence (and insanity) to be able to hold multiple conflicting ideas in your head at once? That's the same drive that lets people say "I think this is a terrible idea, and it'll never succeed...but it's interesting, and it deserves an honest chance, so let me help you with that." Strong opinions lightly held. This starts with the hiring process, I think, which tends to select for people who can appreciate nuance and tend to explore lots of technologies outside those that are immediately useful to them (contrary to popular opinion, Google does not solely care about GPA and alma mater when hiring). Then new recruits get to the Googleplex, and they're immersed in a culture that's just awash in ideas, most of which are terrible, and all of which are listened to. When you see that your coworker's reaction to the brain-dead idea that was just spouted forth is "Hmm. That's interesting - what could you do to test that and develop it?" instead of "That's stupid and it'll never work", you start to reevaluate your snap judgments. And of course, if you work there for any length of time, you'll see a number of those stupid ideas actually launch and become giant successes with millions of users. I remember clearly telling my coworker, about Instant, "I think it's a terrible idea and will fail miserably, but I am really, really glad that I work in a company where we can place these sorts of bets." I wish more places had a culture like this. FaceBook, I've heard, has it. So do many prominent investors in Silicon Valley, and I wonder if that's where Google got it. Top-flight research labs and universities do too. But it's sorely lacking in the general public, and on Reddit, and among our politicians & government, and in many big corporations. It, unfortunately, is not the sort of thing you can pick up from a book or a few blog or forum posts. You really have to be immersed in the culture to absorb it, and even then, your natural inclination is going to say "This is stupid" to most new ideas. It seems to take a lot of mental effort to suspend that judgment and say "Well, this sure looks stupid, but I'll stick with it a little longer and see where it ends up." I've found, though, that that culture is perhaps the most valuable thing that I've gotten out of my time at Google.

borism 16y ago

there's always risk, the question is - how do you measure risk/reward ratio.

nostrademons 16y ago

When Instant was under development, we had an office pool for "How long will it be before Instant is rolled back, and why?", and two of the most popular answers were "2 days - user revolt" and "1 month - global search outage". Of course, anyone who voted there has egg on their face now because it was a successful launch with relatively few problems, which is mostly a credit to the teams involved and the hard work they put in to foresee problems and fix them before launch. But things looked very, very different when the product was still iterating, the UI wasn't worked out, and there was significant doubt that it would be physically possible to do it. It's very easy to look at a product in hindsight and say "Duh, that's obvious, of course it's a good idea, why didn't anyone do it sooner?" It's much harder to take a random idea that's been batted around a few times and say definitively "This is a good idea that we can and must do."

bmm6o 16y ago
There wasn't user revolt, but is Instant widely regarded as a success? I find it mildly annoying myself, but maybe I'm in the minority.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  By public comments, help forum feedback, and press reaction, it was perhaps Google's most successful search launch ever, and certainly within the last year or two. I personally find it mildly annoying too, but I'm apparently in the minority.
moultano 16y ago
Just watching that process from a distance internally was a good lesson for me in product development. Normally I'd expect that if an idea is generally good, people will kinda like the first version, until after gradual iteration eventually they love it. For some things, that's just not true. With the iterations of Instant over months, I saw coworkers go from "argh I hate this I hope it never launches" to "wow, this is cool." They spent most of that time hating it, and only started to like it once it was near perfect. It wasn't a gradual switchover from "meh" to "awesome." It was a sudden shift from "HATE" to "WOW."
- davi 16y ago
  This is really interesting: certain kinds of features and projects suck until they're good. A steeply sloped sigmoid of suckage. Why did the people working on Instant persevere despite their coworkers' reactions? Was it because they had a clear end-vision of awesomeness, and they knew they just hadn't implemented to that point yet? Or was it more intuitive, a sense that there was awesomeness somewhere in parameter space, and that they could get there with continued iteration?
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    It's actually more interesting than that: several of the key people working on the project believed it was impossible and could never succeed. The short answer to your question is "because Larry and Sergey really wanted it". It's amazing how much attention projects that the founders are personally interested in get. That would be very misleading, though, because it's not like anyone was forced to work on Instant, nor is the typical Googler a mindless automaton who always does what he's told. Everyone who worked on Instant was there because they wanted to work on Instant, even the ones who felt it didn't have a prayer of success. The longer answer is that Google's created a culture that tolerates ambiguity remarkably well. Y'know how they say that it's a sign of intelligence (and insanity) to be able to hold multiple conflicting ideas in your head at once? That's the same drive that lets people say "I think this is a terrible idea, and it'll never succeed...but it's interesting, and it deserves an honest chance, so let me help you with that." Strong opinions lightly held. This starts with the hiring process, I think, which tends to select for people who can appreciate nuance and tend to explore lots of technologies outside those that are immediately useful to them (contrary to popular opinion, Google does not solely care about GPA and alma mater when hiring). Then new recruits get to the Googleplex, and they're immersed in a culture that's just awash in ideas, most of which are terrible, and all of which are listened to. When you see that your coworker's reaction to the brain-dead idea that was just spouted forth is "Hmm. That's interesting - what could you do to test that and develop it?" instead of "That's stupid and it'll never work", you start to reevaluate your snap judgments. And of course, if you work there for any length of time, you'll see a number of those stupid ideas actually launch and become giant successes with millions of users. I remember clearly telling my coworker, about Instant, "I think it's a terrible idea and will fail miserably, but I am really, really glad that I work in a company where we can place these sorts of bets." I wish more places had a culture like this. FaceBook, I've heard, has it. So do many prominent investors in Silicon Valley, and I wonder if that's where Google got it. Top-flight research labs and universities do too. But it's sorely lacking in the general public, and on Reddit, and among our politicians & government, and in many big corporations. It, unfortunately, is not the sort of thing you can pick up from a book or a few blog or forum posts. You really have to be immersed in the culture to absorb it, and even then, your natural inclination is going to say "This is stupid" to most new ideas. It seems to take a lot of mental effort to suspend that judgment and say "Well, this sure looks stupid, but I'll stick with it a little longer and see where it ends up." I've found, though, that that culture is perhaps the most valuable thing that I've gotten out of my time at Google.