

Ask HN: Why does Google expose search query processing times to the user? - hariananth

It&#x27;s obviously very important for Google to be instrumenting and logging performance. But considering the simplicity of their search UI, I&#x27;m not sure why query proc times are still exposed. I also can&#x27;t find any other examples of search that have this behavior, including direct competitors (Bing, Yahoo, duckduckgo, etc.).
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bjourne
You would think that Google being a huge company would have good solid reasons
for everything they do. But building software (and search engine websites are
software) involves billions of small decisions taken by each engineer
involved. It's everything down from "should I name this temporary variable 'i'
or 'n'?" to "should the query time be displayed?" and "what format?
milliseconds or fractions of a second? should it be i18n:ized?"

My theory is that it just happened because some engineer decided to add it a
long time ago and then noone found a good reason to remove it.

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rajacombinator
Speed was one of the key factors that set Google search apart from the
competition in the early days. So at that time they wanted to highlight it.
Everyone thought "wow how are they searching so fast?"

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haidrali
For most of the time it acts as a positive to the users that how fast google
can process ....

