
Google Has Dropped Google Instant Search - kjhughes
http://searchengineland.com/google-dropped-google-instant-search-279674
======
x1798DE
This is awesome news. It was always a pain to set up my search engine to have
instant off - and of course instant turns back on if you performed a second
search on the results page of the no-instant page.

I have _never once_ had my search experience enhanced by this anti-feature,
and most of the time it's a hindrance, because I'll start reading the search
results, then based on that come up with a new query and start typing it while
continuing to scan the page. In non-instant world, maybe 60% of the time I'll
end up finding what I want to click on as I continue to scan the page, then
stop typing and click on that (or I'll be reading the name of someone that I
want to google from the except from the page). In instant world, I have to
read the whole page, decide if I need to make a new query, then type it (which
is the exact _opposite_ of the intent of instant, mind you).

The worst thing about Instant was that if you started typing something that
didn't have results it wanted to display (because maybe it was a NSFW-type
query or because it just didn't have good results for the incomplete string),
rather than leaving the old page up until it had something it wanted to show,
it would just _blank the old page_. Horrible.

~~~
benhoyt
Yeah, I worked for Oyster (www.oyster.com) and had NSFW instant search issues
all the time -- if I mistyped our site domain with two W's as "ww.o" the
Instant Search results displayed a rather lewd image. Uh, sorry boss, that
wasn't what I was after.

~~~
jxramos
I wasn't even aware of this feature, sounds dangerous indeed to jump the gun
and search for things as I'm entering the search. Search suggestions make
sense, overly eager premature searches not so much.

------
Shank
Looks like I'm in the minority here, but I really liked instant. I remember
turning in instant from the omnibox in chrome, too. It showed that Google was
at least willing to innovate in the search space -- and for some of us, it was
a huge positive to have.

~~~
swampthinker
Yeah, I usually will start my Google searches in the Omnibox, then use the
search bar on the page when I needed to find something new. In those use
cases, instant is incredibly useful.

~~~
silverbax88
Man, do I hate the Omnibox with a passion. I wouldn't care so much if it
wasn't the default.

~~~
swampthinker
Why don't you like it?

~~~
silverbax88
I hate the idea of moving elements around the entire window after I've started
using them. I don't want to use the address bar as a search bar, but the
overall problem is from a UX standpoint - you start typing into a textbox, and
it vanishes/moves into the address bar. That's like starting to turn a knob on
a door and your hand is suddenly somewhere else, like down near the bottom of
the door or near the top. It's inconsistent and disruptive. It slows down the
experience. I didn't come to the page to get tossed around everywhere, I came
to search for something and get off of the page as quickly as possible.

And it moves the design closer to the horrible design creeping into
applications today: instead of designing for every device, too many apps are
designed for the worst platform, which is mobile. Capital One just redesigned
their entire site for mobile, which added a lot more navigation/clicks for web
users. That's just inferior design. Actually, it's not even design, it's just
inferior hack layout.

We live in an era where original web page design was horrible, and somehow we
continue to make pages harder and harder to use. There's a pervasive myth
among app designers and startups to just 'remove' functionality instead of
actually delivering _smart_ functionality. Simplifaction for ease of use is
geat, but most simplification is just reducing an app to a single button and
just makes real functionality harder to use. Omnibox falls into that trend.
Make the search results better, get rid of spam, and stop spending even one
second writing code to move the text input around inexplicably.

Good design should be invisible - I shouldn't notice it. Moving elements
around after I've started interacting with them is just unnecessary annoyance
with no benefit to me as a user. I don't want another crappy universal search
bar, which is all this is. I just want to enter a search and move to the next
page, so I can try and sift through the crappily selected results Google spits
out. I already know Google's results are going to be poor enough I'll have to
wade through them, why slow me down up front?

And so on.

~~~
manigandham
This seems to be the "new tab/page" box which every browser does, moving from
center of page to address bar.

You can easily switch to a different new page or use the address bar from the
beginning.

~~~
silverbax88
I know that, because that's what I do. But my point is, I shouldn't have to
know how to 'hack' around the browser just to use a textbox. That's really
inferior UX design. I shouldn't even be thinking about any of that, I should
be thinking about what the Google results are, not how to use Google.

~~~
manigandham
What are you hacking around? Why not just use the address bar all the time?

~~~
shitgoose
then why putting an input area in the middle of the page with inviting prompt
"search google or type url"? simple act of entering search terms and pressing
Enter button - instead turns into a mental game of "if it is a brand new
search, then search terms will appear in url bar no matter where i type them;
when search results come, my search terms will be copied to the input box on
the page and later can be edited there". sorry, this is just plain stupid.
sounds like an executive design, no normal developer would come up with this
crap.

------
Coincoin
Good riddance.

This was a marketing feature more than anything else so google could boast
about how fast their search engine was. However, it always had tons of
usability problems for no added benefit to the user, especially when refining
a previous search, or trying to retype some funky word you found in the
results.

~~~
puzzle
Yes, part of it was marketing, but there were benefits, too, e.g. for slow
typers, which of course do not abound in this corner of the Internet.

~~~
johansch
In my experience these slow typists also tend to look at the keyboard while
they are typing - not at the screen. Thereby completely negating the benefit
for this group of people.

I guess that for the intersection of slow typists who look at the screen while
typing, Instant Search is useful. But how big is this intersection really?

~~~
puzzle
You're right to some degree, but there were lots of user studies done. It was
a net positive.

One of the amusing things was that users would follow the instant results
without necessarily being consciously aware of them. I.e., when describing
their interactions with prototypes, only a few noticed and pointed out that
they were getting results without pressing Enter, yet a larger number clicked
on them. It had to be pointed out to them, at which point they would often go
"whoa". I remember a few non technical users who really raved about it.

~~~
johansch
I wonder if something clever could be done to automatically switch behavior
over time based on keystroke timings, suggestion selection behavior, etc.

Maybe it would just end up feeling random and unreliable though.

------
andybak
I rather liked Instant Search but it dawns on me that I hadn't noticed it's
absence as I never go to the Google homepage any more. Searching from the
address bar is all I ever do - and that doesn't seem to have changed.

------
pavement
Wow, finally.

This was such a disruptive feature. Completely distracting from the moment you
interact with the page. This wasn't a productivity bonus in any way,
regardless of purported reading recognition rates and eye tracking/movement
measurements.

No, computer. You wait until I'm finished. You wait until I tell you I want
you to do something. You don't jump at every flinch of my fingers. Not all
interactions require reaction.

~~~
Bartweiss
Now if only they would stop swapping Images, News, and Shopping link around
based on my search. I want a picture of whatever I searched for, that's why I
clicked the button next to 'All' like I have a thousand times before - don't
reorder your damn links from page to page!

~~~
droidist2
Oh man, I hate that, especially when it pushes up Maps and relegates Videos to
the "More" menu. Google tries to be way too clever for its own good.

~~~
Bartweiss
Yep, that's the worst. Reordering static-looking buttons is awful, but
promoting options in and out of a secondary menu is completely deranged
design.

------
user5994461
Meanwhile at google:

A: "We could save hundreds of millions in hardware resources if we disabled
instant search."

B: "But we might lose money if we don't show as many ads. OH WAIT..."

The guy did a search and realized that the suggestion menu overlaps on the top
of the page, where the ads are displayed.

He then tried to click the ad and he couldn't because the ad results changed
the moment he moved his cursor away from the search bar.

It took them 7 years to realize their mistake!

~~~
jarnix
I was intrigued that nobody was talking about the revenue effect of the
removal of Instant Search. Obviously they did it because of this.

~~~
wfisher
I'm pretty sure they turned on Instant Search in 2010 in order to serve more
ads not fewer.

The extra load due to this feature was not insignificant. I heard it was the
equivalent of an entire datacenter.

------
unclesaamm
The most annoying part is still there -- of the home page morphing into the
search results page as soon as text is typed. It is a totally nonsensical
design.

1) Type stuff into google.com 2) Delete all the text

You are now on a totally empty results page. Why is this a sensible design?

~~~
trvr
This isn't happening for me. Try it in incognito mode, maybe?

~~~
deckar01
They already turned instant search off. Without instant search it doesn't go
to a results page when you start typing.

------
bbotond
I hated the "instantness" of Instant Search but loved the keyboard shortcuts
which seem to have disappeared. I used TAB and the arrow keys to select a
search result and Ctrl+Enter to open the result in a new tab.

It is very, very sad that it is no longer possible to use those.

~~~
alexman
Yes to me it is insane that Google doesn't provide native keyboard shortcuts
(at least make it an option) for the search results page. It is available on
Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, etc. Why not Google search??

------
aylmao
Finally.

I completely hated how as I was typing I would change my mind and decide maybe
I did want to click on a link only to see it instantly disappear. Then the
back-button didn't work as expected, so I just ended up having to re-type my
query.

Every time.

~~~
MrBra
> having to retype my query

Especially annoying when testing multiple queries to find the optimal one and
you decided that a query of 3 submissions ago was the most effective and you
couldn't remember it precisely.

------
Chloro
I loved this feature! This makes me sad. It really shouldn't be a big deal to
let people enable it for their own accounts or to just disable it for mobile.
I don't see the benefit of just getting rid of it completely.

------
EpicEng
Thank God.

This feature has been the bane of my Google existence. I often want to hit
backspace to go back a page, but because their search bar steals my focus, I
instead remove a letter or two and perform a search again.

I have never, not once, found this feature to be useful. Who doesn't type
faster than they can read a page of results?

~~~
arkbyte
Removal of instant shouldn't change the behavior of the search bar's focusing.
I haven't noticed what your'e talking about, though.

~~~
bcoates
They have appeared to have implemented disabling instant search by simply
reverting all post-instant search antifeatures:

No instant search

No steal focus on result page (and thus, no breaking backspace)

No overriding arrow key scroll into weird blue-arrow modal UI

Basically 2010 era google, all at one stroke.

The result quality is still kind of meh though.

------
bonaldi
So "I'm Feeling Lucky" is a real and clickable button again!

~~~
Sylos
Would have been before, too, if you had JavaScript disabled, wouldn't it?

But yeah, that is interesting. They supposedly lose/lost a lot of money from
that button, as it skips past their ads.

Also, they are supposedly redesigning the Google Homepage [0], moving away
from having just the search field there to having a news feed, the weather and
some such there as well.

So, maybe this change is in anticipation of that and maybe they'll also tuck
some ads into there then, to actually monetize the time people spend on their
homepage.

[0]: [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/20/google-
ch...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/20/google-change-home-
page-first-time-since-1996-app-based-feed-news-events-sports)

------
Anarch157a
Instant search was one of the reasons I moved to DuckDuckGo. Google could
learn a lot from DDG. There's so many actually usefull features on the results
page that now I feel lost when I'm using Google.

------
alexkavon
Good. This was their most useless and wonky feature. Not sure how this was
supposed to change search.

~~~
waqf
Yes, this feature had negative value for me. A common use case is that I'm
copying keywords from search result snippets back into the search bar to make
a more refined followup search, and Instant Search snatches the result away
while I'm trying to copy text from it.

~~~
and0
This is exactly what drove me crazy about it.

------
Animats
Does anybody really look at the Google home page any more? Browsers and mobile
devices all have search boxes now. Bing tried putting good artwork on their
home page, and nobody noticed.

Google's "robots.txt" file doesn't let bots read their home page. Most other
pages on Google are bot-readable, but not the home page. It's like they don't
want it to be indexed by other search engines. That might change once it gets
content.

~~~
odammit
I noticed the art. :)

I thought it was funny because they touted how relevant their search results
were then blasted you with seemingly random pictures.

------
alien1993
I had Instant Search on for just one reason: movement with arrow keys. Since
they killed it's bothering me, I hope they bring at least this option back. If
not does anyone else has a solution?

~~~
Ajedi32
This. Having to switch to the mouse just to click the first or second search
result on the list is going to be really annoying. I hope they bring the
keyboard shortcuts back.

------
czardoz
Suddenly, I can no longer navigate between results using Tab -> Arrow Up/Arrow
Down.

Was this removed as well? :-/

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Oh Lord - hijacking the arrow keys, which I use for page-scrolling, is one of
the most annoying things ever. Kill it with fire!

~~~
manigandham
It's a list of search results - why scroll when you can directly pick the
result?

~~~
MiddleEndian
In Firefox I can hit / or ' to type the link I want and hit enter. When sites
mess around with keyboard shortcuts it makes my browsing experience
inconsistent and disorienting.

~~~
manigandham
That's a very slow and technical way but you can still do that if you want.

~~~
MiddleEndian
I wouldn't describe it as slow. Rarely need type more than a few characters
and I don't need to count.

------
surds
I think this feature might have helped people who are slow at typing.

May be off-topic, but I remember an incidence from Home Depot when I asked a
staff member to look something up for me. She pulled up a browser (think it
was IE), typed google in the nav bar (perhaps to get to google.com) and got
the bing search result for search term 'google'. Then she continued on to use
the bing search to look for Home Depot's site (I assume she was thinking she
is searching on Google).

I didn't get what I was looking for, but I did leave wondering about use-case
or user interaction scenarios like this that I would have never thought of.

Yeah, I think that Instant Search must have had its value for people, even if
not much for me.

------
pishpash
While we're at it, how about bringing back the search box at the bottom of the
page, too?

------
jokoon
Auto complete is already an awesome feature to have, instant search is
clutter, it creates too much traffic, and sometimes it doesn't work (nothing
shows for a while).

Now it would be nice if google would stop choosing french as a search language
because I live there, I have to set it up everyday and I don't want to enable
cookies... I don't know if I can access google with english as default in some
special page.

~~~
coke12
Have you tried using google.com/ncr?

------
mstade
Does this mean we can regain the backspace-to-go-back that's been everywhere
since forever, but was killed by Chrome because of instant search?

~~~
untog
IIRC backspace-to-go-back was not killed because of instant search, it was
killed because users kept going back when they didn't mean to, because they
thought they were typing in a text box and weren't.

~~~
seanp2k2
There's still e.g. [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/backspace-to-go-
ba...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/backspace-to-go-
back/nlffgllnjjkheddehpolbanogdeaogbc?hl=en) but IMO it's ridiculous to not
just make this an option. Hide it in a flag.
[https://venturebeat.com/2016/08/14/restore-backspace-
shortcu...](https://venturebeat.com/2016/08/14/restore-backspace-shortcut-
chrome/) they decided that 400k users was not enough to warrant a flag for.

But hey, cmd+q to quit immediately, with "warn before quit" off by default is
a great idea. No need to look at that one or make it possible to change the
key bind. Never mind that it's one key away from cmd+tab.

This is the kind of stuff you get when you make decisions based on A/B
testing.

~~~
jackcarter
There's a hack to sort-of disable the keybind: Go to chrome://extensions/ and
open "Keyboard Shortcuts" (bottom right). Pick an extension you don't use
anymore (or install one), and set the shortcut for "Activate the extension" to
cmd+q or ctrl+shift+q.

------
jmcdiesel
I didn't mind it, but I wont miss it either. I usually end up typing my whole
search as a matter of "my brain sent these words to my fingers and my fingers
are going to type until they are done" kinda thing anyway, so it was a wasted
feature

------
amiga-workbench
Never found this particularly nice to use, at least this will drop their
server load a bit.

~~~
popcorncolonel
I'd be interested to see if this is actually true.

~~~
ralusek
Whether it is actually true is going to be entirely based on what you consider
to be "a bit" of server load.

They had to return data for many search results on entry, in addition to
suggested autocomplete. Now they just return suggested autocomplete. I'm sure
everything in google instant is served from a cached cdn, but it's still going
to be "some" server load that is removed.

------
red_admiral
[https://google.com/webhp?complete=0](https://google.com/webhp?complete=0)
still works for me. No instant, no suggestions, just type and press enter.

------
johnhenry
I suspect this has more to do with recent European regulations than anything
else. Instantly sending search queries without [explicit] confirmation is a
minefield of liability for the company.

------
CM30
God, instant search was such a pain. So much in fact that instead of typing
anything into Google when it was on, I used to type it out in Notepad or
another editor and paste that into the box instead. Just found it incredibly
distracting otherwise.

Nice to know they've gotten rid of it.

------
tannhaeuser
Why did they drop it exactly? How does removing it makes search "more fluid on
all devices" (according to TFA). I'm not complaining, but I suspect the
attention bandwidth now left on the table is going to be plastered with
something else soon enough.

------
symlinkk
This way always a bad idea, and I imagine the excuse of "now more users are on
mobile" is just there to protect Marissa Mayer's reputation. You should be
able to reference the results on a search page as you type your next search.

------
ofek
Did anyone else notice they reduced the number of autocomplete fields from
10ish to 4? I really dislike this change for discoverability reasons.

Is there a way to change this?

------
have_faith
Did the auto search terms contribute to things like Google trends? like half
finished searches effecting popularity of an adwords search phrase or similar?

------
koolba
Dang. Now I don't have a legit excuse for pausing to view the results for NSFW
prefixes of SFW search terms. Ex: _sex[tant]_

------
deftturtle
This feature was never useful. Not to mention wasted bandwidth. Glad it's
dead. Just give me simplicity.

------
WalterBright
The article web site crashes Chrome.

------
kylehotchkiss
I won't miss it, I disliked searching when I found my result with partial word
and see it for a split second but lose it as I finish typing the word, not
reacting quickly enough. Having to backtrack character by character to find it
was frustrating. I'd rather just click "search" and not have to deal with the
letter by letter tweaking.

~~~
workerIbe
'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.'

I honestly cannot understand your sentiment, how can knowing something you are
interested in exists be worse than not knowing at all?

------
madisfun
Glad it's gone. Probably it's more about energy saving and DC optimization.

------
amelius
Good. And now stop changing Google. I don't want to be surprised every time I
use your tools.

(Edit: And that holds for the doodle too. They are sometimes funny, but not so
much so as to warrant making me lose focus. I'm working, not watching TV)

~~~
Bartweiss
My least-favorite change is that the All/Image/Shopping/News buttons on the
search page rearrange based on your choice of term. Static-looking features
shouldn't shuffle themselves around based on my form inputs!

(It's _worse_ because I've never wanted the Shopping button, ever, but it's
bad design regardless.)

------
EGreg
Finally! I always felt this feature was weird and abrupt.

------
odammit
Well there goes an entire category of meme. RIP internet.

~~~
_delirium
The search suggestions are still there, so the various memes around "why do
..." still work. The part that's been removed is that Google Instant used to
start showing you the results page as you typed, before hitting enter.

~~~
odammit
Ohhhhh. I misunderstood. Thank the lulz gods.

------
archagon
On the topic of annoying Google features, did they recently make it so that
links to search results opened in new tabs? Is that a feature that one can
turn off? It's eating up my iOS tabs!

------
baalimago
i used instant search to simply see what other people search, laugh, then
proceed to finding whatever i want to find by searching myself

------
Upvoter33
suggestions are awesome - instant results, less so. overall, a good choice.

------
agumonkey
Poor Mayer ..

------
igtztorrero
I hated, thanks

------
frik
The reason, Google wants to display some content (cards with news/trending
topics) on the Google frontpage.

------
sreeramb93
Please drop support for google AMP or make it optional. Half of the Indian
mainstream media is not available on it.

------
konpikwastaken
Whenever I see "Google Instant" reference, I get always chuckle because I
swear that two of my friends and I actually invented it back in '09 for a
Yahoo sponsored Hackathon.

I clearly remember one day logging onto my machine, going to google to search
for something and just sitting there with my jaw on the ground as the
"instant" feature began searching as I typed. I must've sat there for at least
5 minutes. I then proceeded to call my friends and made them go to google to
"just execute a query". The response was "those motherf _& kers actually
ripped off our idea".

I will say, while the idea was "new" (no one was doing it at the time as far
as we were aware of), the hackathon code was pure garbage PHP and JS fueled by
free pizza & soda and stitched together to leverage the Yahoo APIs.

We went back and actually looked at our server logs (it was running a
.edu/students/ site at the time as part of our portfolios) and noticed
SIGNIFICANT traffic spikes from Google & MSFT registered corp IPs.
Unfortunately, we figured there was nothing we could do to prove that _we*
invented it.

Something for you to chuckle at:

\- Only reference I could find is a wayback link to the 2009 hackathon page
("Skynet Search" was also 'contextual' and knew if you wanted images or maps
or directions without having you to make extra clicks). There used to be a
blog post mention on yahoo as we got some runner-up prize. [1]

\- Google Instant Launched Sept 2010 [2]

[1]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20091024035258/http://developer....](https://web.archive.org/web/20091024035258/http://developer.yahoo.com:80/hacku/show/2009/feb/washington)
[2] [https://www.google.com/doodles/google-instant-
launch](https://www.google.com/doodles/google-instant-launch)

~~~
jacquesm
I had instant search on documentation files in ... 1991.

And I'm fairly sure I wasn't the first to think of that either.

Just because you think you think of something 'first' doesn't mean you really
are the first and doesn't mean that your idea is being ripped off by others,
most likely they were totally unaware of 'your' idea, just like they were
unaware of mine.

Most of these are obvious anyway.

~~~
konpikwastaken
Fair enough.

------
alistproducer2
>Google Instant launched in 2010 under the leadership of Marissa Mayer. Mayer
called this change a “fundamental shift in search”....

So Mayer does it again, lol. My favorite thing is how this lady was praised as
some sort of genius for managing the Google search page - as if that page is
some marvel of modern engineering and not just a webpage with and input and no
background.

~~~
chris_va
Hm, let's not have personal attacks here, especially for a topic on which you
do not have any personal experience.

Having worked on Google Search during this period, I can say definitively that
your comment is mostly incorrect. Features at Google are generally bottom-up
driven. Mayer was in many ways acting as a gatekeeper to keep some of the
crazier stuff from harming the experience or brand.

~~~
puzzle
Well, there was a lot of bottom-up work, but in this case Instant was pushed
by Marissa. A lot of infrastructure had to be built, scaled and tuned before
launch, so that the demos could actually serve the millions of users, their
wonky browsers or ISPs, etc.

~~~
chris_va
I agree that she supported the launch, but Marissa wasn't involved in any of
the infrastructure work, machine planning, etc.

~~~
puzzle
Of course she wasn't involved in making things work efficiently and reliably,
since that never was her responsibility, but the whole reason all of that had
to happen was because she decided to turn what normally would be one of the
many, many cool internal demos into a public, differentiating feature (and got
signoff from upper management). I'll miss Instant on desktop, for the record.
It was a great achievement to implement in a relatively short period of time.

~~~
chris_va
I think you're being slightly unfair here in assigning credit/blame/what-have-
you.

I agree with you that she liked it, and signed off on the product. However, we
had to scale the infrastructure 7x. That wasn't a VP level of money, that was
a BoD level of money. The decision to push the launch was made by Eric.

~~~
puzzle
I wouldn't quote numbers (or multipliers) here, but my recollection is that,
after a lot of tuning, it was lower than what you mention, at least in the
section of the stack that I was involved with. Of course, the board had to
give some kind of sign off (which is what I meant by upper management), before
even knowing the full price :-), but the case for this differentiating feature
was being made by Marissa. It wasn't merely signing off. I don't remember
anyone ever bringing up Eric when talking about it. If anyone, it was her, for
good or for bad. She stuck with it even if early iterations were clunky, slow
or inefficient. I'll grant her that she started with something that I thought
unfeasible and almost a pipe dream, eventually seeing it turn into something
actually useful, with the help of hundreds (Eng, PM, UX, etc.).

