
Google Instant, behind the scenes - arfrank
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-instant-behind-scenes.html
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extension
I'm amazed that users couldn't tell the qualitative difference between
submitting a form and find-as-you-type. To a hacker, AJAX is a whole other
experience but to Joe User, it's just a bit faster. It's something to keep in
mind if your AJAX interface _isn't_ actually faster.

Yet another unconscious programmer assumption shattered.

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mrtron
Google Instant is shockingly fast. It is hard to imagine a small startup
creating it and having it work for a few beta users. Even harder to imagine
Google scaling up their infrastructure 10-fold.

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inscitekjeff
I agree. It's an impressive interface. If this really proves to be a very
desirable improvement from an end user perspective, it may take Bing YEARS to
be able to duplicate the experience unless they had something like this in the
works already. ie: It takes lots of coordinated effort to make something like
this possible at scale. Congrats to the Google team!

~~~
kenjackson
Technologically it's not very difficult, IMO, once you already have search
engines that are as fast as Google and Bing.

The tough part for Bing, is with fewer searches, their predictive engine isn't
quite as good. But this is where the Yahoo deal will pay off.

But all they need to do is fire off predictive searches and bring those back
-- and of course, each predictive search only needs to bring back ten or fewer
results.

Bing already does the predictive text suggestion. They just need to send back
queries along with the actual text suggestion. At worst they'd need to get
some more servers. But I fully expect they'd be able to roll this out in
months if they wanted to.

Although personally I'd still focus on relevance. There's so much stuff both
engines suck at, I'd love for them to fix some of those holes first.

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samlittlewood
I would have loved to be a fly on the wall at Microsoft when someone said -
'That's weird, have you tried google today?'

I assume some of the ajaxy Google logos have been leading up to this -
especially the one that coloured in the letters as you typed.

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SanjayUttam
That's not much of a "behind the scenes". Granted, this is still rather
impressive. Would love to get more technical details on it.

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shaggy
I think the most interesting piece of that article is that they are caching
per user results. So not only have they made result display dynamic, but
they've made the performance unique to everyone using the system.

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boredguy8
They capture my keyboard after I search from the menu bar of Chrome, so I
can't hit backspace to return to the previous page. Even if I click outside of
the box, any Google search page redirects my backspace into the search box,
which also changes the results.

It's rather quite annoying.

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pak
My issue is I almost always search from the address bar of chrome, or the
search box of any other browser, so I never see the "instant" effect. I can't
remember the last time I actually went to google.com except when linked to see
a cool logo design.

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brown9-2
Anyone else curious how long those 50 person stand-up meetings took?

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smhinsey
Even by the scrum ideal of <1 minute per person, that's longer than most
traditional "status meetings." Must've been loads of fun.

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nostrademons
The couple I sat in for were 10ish minutes (I think the NBC Nightly News
segment has a program manager saying "Alright, 12 minutes"). They were done so
that each team reported to their team lead what they were working on
beforehand, and then at the scrum, the team leads aggregated everything that
was going on with their team.

~~~
smhinsey
Makes sense. Few scrum teams get that large where you need to start thinking
about optimizations like that.

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amichail
_In user studies, people quickly found a new way to interact with Google: type
until the gray text matches your intention and then move your eyes to the
results. We were actually surprised at how well this worked—most people in our
studies didn’t even notice that anything had changed. Google was just faster._

If this is the case, then what's the point of showing the search results as
the user types? It seems that just having predictions is sufficient.

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ugh
They tested that:

 _For example, we tried a prototype where we waited for someone to stop typing
before showing results, which did not work. We realized the experience needed
to be fast to work well._

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amichail
Cursor down + return is pretty fast.

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ugh
It’s never fast enough until people can’t tell the difference. “Pretty fast”
is meaningless in that context. What matters is whether it is perceptibly
faster or slower.

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amichail
I think the real issue is something that Google is not telling us.

Maybe most people can't figure out they can press cursor down + return.

Or maybe this is a flashy way to distinguish their product from the
competition.

Or maybe this is a way to encourage users to use shorter queries (as they can
see how effective they are from the search results), thus forcing advertisers
to pay more for more general terms.

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ugh
I vote “people can't figure out they can press cursor down + return.” And
that’s a perfectly good reason for changing the UI.

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jey
Even those who can figure it out probably benefit from fewer necessary steps,
allowing them to pay less attention to the _process_ of searching and more
attention to the _content_.

