

Yahoo Dropped the ball on Google Instant in 2005 - satishmreddy
http://uniquehazards.tumblr.com/post/1088334156/google-instant-is-an-example-of-how-yahoo-could-have

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nostrademons
I remember, back when Instant was first ramping up staffing from prototype to
production levels, saying,

"It's going to be a spectacular failure, but I am very, very glad that I work
in a company where we can take risks like this."

(In my defense, remember that chart Google released today showing the resource
usage of various incarnations of Instant? It was in the Prototype stage at the
time, with a total cost roughly 10-20x existing websearch. We were talking
about having to build new datacenters to support it. And the UI was nowhere
near as polished; I found it very jarring to use at the time.)

I think there's a lesson for entrepreneurs in here somewhere: imagine where
the technology _could be_ , not where it _is_. Almost all innovations are
pretty crappy when they first come out. That's a reason to improve them, not a
reason to cancel them. Many problems that look impossible at first can be
solved given enough engineering effort and creative thinking.

I think it also says a lot about the management style of Larry & Sergei vs.
the MBAs at Yahoo. There's a tendency, as companies get bigger, to look at
things rationally and say "We have $X to lose if this fails, and some
uncertain $Y to gain if it succeeds. The chance of success is low. Let's not
do it." Larry & Sergei say "Okay, we know what the risks are. $X is high but
manageable, and $Y is unknown but potentially big. Let's do it."

~~~
ChrisFrost
The development chart of Instant sounds interesting. I've been unable to find
it - could you provide a URL?

~~~
nostrademons
It's 48 minutes into the official press event on Google Instant:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0eMHRxlJ2c>

(Shamefully, I do not know how to link to a specific time point in a YouTube
video.)

BTW, basically all of Othar & Ben's presentation is worth watching (it starts
at 30 minutes in) - he says a lot of what I do here, except I'm one of the
skeptical people saying "It'll never work". ;-)

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damncabbage
As an ex-Yahoo!, this is _exactly_ the sort of thing that cheesed me off while
I was still working there.

Best memory: not being allowed to use javascript-enhanced sliding panels for
pagination, as the reduction in full page refreshes when navigating would have
negatively impacted the Ad Impression stats.

(That and the quarterly lay-offs. Good motivational tool, that one.)

~~~
jyothi
One of the smart things in Instant for google with instant is positively
impacting the Ad Impressions. (page load still not necessary - but ads refresh
with the search results)

I won't be surprised if the idea sparked more as an effort for 'How do we
increase ad impressions? ' than search assistance for user.

------
seldo
This is a textbook example of Yahoo's problems as a company (I'm an ex-Yahoo).

It's all there: poor execution (performance/quality), insufficient focus on
the user experience, focus on per-search revenue rather than long term search
share, and above all no appetite for risk. Say what you like about Bing, but
they are at least throwing caution to the wind and trying new and different
things.

~~~
edanm
I particularly liked their version of Image Search, with "infinitely
scrolling" results. It took a while, but Google eventually copied it.

That's what I love about competition: we users are the ones who win!

------
aaronbrethorst
At the risk of sounding like a troll, I think the title is unnecessarily
specific: yahoo didn't just drop the ball on instant search, photo sharing,
social bookmarking, x, or y, or z. They just dropped the ball. Period. As has
been extensively documented, Yahoo is a tech company that has never wanted to
be a tech company.

Given a few more years, I'm sure they'll get their wish when they cease to be
a company altogether.

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petervandijck
Two points:

1\. their UI was worse. If you don't do something like this right, it can be
worse than doing nothing at all.

2\. this depends largely on the correctness of the predictions. I assume
Yahoo's predictions weren't half as good either.

But still cool, yes.

~~~
satishmreddy
Yup. Google did a lot of eye tracking studies to get the timing & UI right.

But it means that if Yahoo invested in it, they might have had a shot at
getting it right.

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zach
This was big news back then... for interface developers. Its popularity
influenced a lot of further development (including spurring Google's AJAX
Search API, I believe) and established it as a popular paradigm.

But I remember the version of it on Yahoo's then-beta search site, not this
more extensive version on AllTheWeb. Here's an example:
[http://looksgoodworkswell.blogspot.com/2005/12/distracting-o...](http://looksgoodworkswell.blogspot.com/2005/12/distracting-
or-narrowing-looking.html)

I guess this was a more limited version of it, but it made a lot of sense to
just pop up the most relevant result immediately.

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cbsmith
This wasn't the only innovation in Search that Yahoo dropped the ball on.
There were at least a handful of cool ideas implemented at the company, but
there was a prevailing attitude of wanting to let Google be the innovator and
simply follow in their footsteps (talk about insane).

------
joshu
Written by my lead PM from Delicious.

~~~
satishmreddy
I thought it was really cool that he did it 5 years ago.

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Tycho
I like the new Instant Search but I don't think I'll use it much. All my
searches are conducted from search bars in Safari or Chrome where I just need
to tap or tab to the bar and type. One thing that has changed my search habits
recently though is the Safari 5 extension that lets you do mouseover searches
where you highlight some text then a little window pops up with some search
results and the start of the wikipedia page. So I can look something up
without even typing or leaving the page/window. I take it this too has been
done before? It's really 'game-changing' as far as my UX and interaction with
search/ads goes.

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joe_the_user
I'm a fan of the idea of the Google interface.

But I don't think it could have made up for an inferior search. If you don't
get what you want, you won't care how quickly you get. By 2005, Yahoo had lost
on the basic search infrastructure side and even revolutionary interface
wouldn't change that.

I'm not even much of a fan of the present implementation of type-ahead on
Google. On my machine with an average broad band connection, all it does blank
my old results till I've typed my new results. It could be because I'm using
Firefox on Ubuntu. Still.

