It’s interesting to see that a lot of people who search use their toolbar / shortcut keys and do not go directly to Google…
It would be great to see the break down of this ine.g.
% of user using toolbar search
% users using Google page search etc…
The feature is useful, non-invasive and a great new direction for Google in my opinion.
Don’t agree and want to turn it off?
Problem solved.
I read somewhere that Yahoo came up with the concept of Instant Google back in '95.
I think this is the most relevant criticism of Google Instant I’ve read yet; to me at least, and users like me. While I am developing, debugging or trying to fix something I’ve broken, the process is usually the same:
- Tab across to my browser window
- Ctrl-T to open new tab
- Type what I want
- Hit enter
If I wanted to “save time” by using Google Instant, I’d have to…
- Tab across to my browser window
- Ctrl-T to open new tab
- Type google.co.uk
- Start typing something && look at the results as they come up
A similar sized list, but far slower, for me at least. This is the reason I doubt I will personally see much of Google instant. However, I don’t know if it will affect us as a business either, because although the vast majority of sales come from Google searches (not other search engines), and a lot of our work goes in to improving search result rankings. From what I’ve read, these results won’t change… unless potential customers start getting taken away on a wikipedia-esque WTF was I searching for in the first place situation 
Today I watched an “average” web user play with this for the first time. She thought it was brilliant!
Normally she’d search for something and browse through 3 or 4 results pages to find any links she wanted to click on, then she’d choose “the best of the bunch”. Now with this new innovation she started to use variations of her search terms (without any promting from me) and see instant results. She found several sites she’d never visited before and bookmarked them. Incidently she still looked through 3-4 pages of search results.
For my friend it let her discover new sites in just a few minutes, whereas previously she would have given up and stuch with the sites she alraedy knew about - that must say something.
LOL! I was really surprised this morning about this one…I was like typing my keyword then it got me an instant result…
anyone care to share the impact of Google Instant to your traffic?
Luckily for me, keeping google on my javascript black list prevents this…
Ever go to look something up in a dictionary or an encyclopedia? Ever end up a few hours later having read a whole bunch of crap but can’t remember any more what it was you originally wanted to look up, because you saw all this other stuff while searching instead?
Seriously, if I’m going to look up turkey recipes, you bet your butt I’ll waste time reading about some festival going on in Istanbul instead.
Yeah, no way. This kind of searching is for the incurious : )
Hi,
this new thing i like most.
Maybe you missed Eric Schmidt saying that ‘branding will sort out the cesspit of the internet’. If you type in a single letter, of course you’re going to get large companies, their branding is superior. With nothing but a single letter to go on Google isn’t going to be able to factor in local/geotargeted factors.
It’s important that Instant Google does not induce what people would normally search for, or make them lazy searches.
To be fair I like the feature working, but I have yet to see it’s usefulness for me finding web-pages and so forth. It’s more like a gimmick than anything else at the moment. For some reason I don’t want to turn it off, because I like seeing it in action, but it feels kind of odd too. I think I might have to get use to it.
From another point of view, it’s always good to see what the top ranking searches are. Another great feature is to show me how many people searched for them, in an instant. That would be amazing.
You have a link right beside the search field that says “instant is on”. Click on that and you will turn it off (it only appears when you start to type)
[FONT=“Georgia”]Is there a way to turn it off?
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[FONT=“Georgia”]I have mental blinders on the rest of the page while typing a search term because I find that instant results thing really distracting. Kind of irritating.
I do like that the page clears when I clear the search term though.
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Dodo is still alive and kicking here in Australia, preying on the weak and thick-headed bogan’s with credit cards…
That’s a pretty big chip on your shoulder there…
Google do not prioritise large corporations because they are large corporations - they prioritise them because those sites are more likely to be what people are looking for.
You might have the best recipe for beetroot soup in the world, but if someone starts typing “n” into Google, the odds are much higher that they will want one of Next, New Look, National Rail and Natwest than “Newviewit’s recipe for beetroot soup”.
What do you think the top results for “e…” should be, if not three of the most popular websites in existence?
Many of Google’s ideas were pioneered by other companies, but their success is down to them doing it better than anyone else.
Good point.
Time to get grandma on the computer and see what she thinks. Or, my boss, who cares very very much about Google but doesn’t seem to quite understand what it’s all about… : )
Some really nice points - I certainly didn’t think of it in this way. My only reservation would be that most of the time I don’t end up making more than one search. For instance, if I was programming CURL in PHP and wanted to remind myself the parameters setopt would accept, I’d just write curl setopt in to my address pane and I’d immediately go there (or it would be the first result). This is more what I meant by not needing it. I suppose I use google search as a lazy way of not having to remember URL’s or use my mouse to use menu navigation on web sites when I know what page I want. I can’t say using Google Instant for this use-case would be faster by miles, but as you put, it’s not really intended to fit this purpose, so maybe me referring to it as a criticism isn’t fair.
However I totally accept your point about searching in a more traditional sense. If I wanted to, for instance, search how to search a multi-dimensional array - there is possibly tens or even hundreds of search patterns to find similar results, but that killer result I’m after may only pop-up with a certain combination of keywords I never thought of. That I can see being faster by miles.