

Why Google went instant - anderzole
http://www.technologyreview.com/web/26314/?a=f

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noelchurchill
Here is my theory.

Google instant does an even better job of getting the user to use their
predetermined search query rather than continuing to type out the users longer
tail search query.

By funneling search traffic into these head terms, Google is concentrating
traffic around the terms with higher AdWords CPCs. And as more and more users
are funneled into these terms it will increase the level of competition
bidding on these terms, further driving up the CPC to appear of the first
page.

Seems the most plausible to me!

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Andrew_Quentin
Until you ask, well why do people use long tail search terms? Might it be
because the "head terms" do not offer them what they wanted.

Unless, long tail search terms really are something of a waste of time for the
user and the head term can offer them just what they wanted anyway, but the
user was ignorant of that.

~~~
noelchurchill
Scenario:

A user began typing what would have been a long-tail query, but realizes the
results have satisfied their query without typing the full thing.

I'm not saying long-tail is going to disappear, because it's not, at least not
for now. But I'm sure a significant portion of would-be long-tail queries are
going to be rerouted into short tail queries.

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jerf
There's a certain vacuity to the core point here... "Why did Google do this
thing? Why, to improve their bottom line." Well, yeah. Let me tell you, the
company I work for also has quite a few initiatives that involve improving the
bottom line. Wow.

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Aron
I just noticed that Google autocompletes 'j' with 'justin bieber'. I realize
that letter has a high scrabble value but c'mon.

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samatman
Google is in a unique position to know the first-order Shannon compression of
the letter "j".

for the record, I get 'JetBlue' for "j". "s" gives me "skype", q gives me
"quotes".

It's actually kind of fascinating.

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RK
Java. Maybe because I'm sitting in the CS dept right now? :)

The results are definitely reflecting the geolocation of my IP (I'm not logged
in and have cookies off).

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Aron
I think I need to move somewhere that autocompletes to java.

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bad_user
Maybe Google is afraid of Twitter's search potential?

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adambyrtek
Twitter search might be useful to track breaking news, conferences or
celebrity gossip, but I wouldn't count on it to find something remotely
useful.

I don't even claim that low signal-to-noise ratio is to blame here. I believe
it's rather the length limit, it's obvious that the more content you have, the
better index you can build for a given document.

PS. Google has its own real-time search, crawling primarily Twitter updates.
<http://bit.ly/9PUpaf>

