[mrshoe]

I'm sorry, but this is a solution to the wrong problem.

I switched from AltaVista to Google back in 1998, not because their search engine returned results more quickly, but because their results were much more relevant.

In the past few years, SEOs have set up micro-sites on just about any topic I could possibly search for and they've managed to rank highly for those topics. Am I the only one who's sick of being taken to these shallow landing pages smothered in ads? Does anyone else think Google's search results are now far less relevant than they were 5 years ago?

I don't need search results that update live as I type. I need to find what I'm looking for.

[neilk]

Your own perception of why you switched may be partially in error.

Google has done a lot of research to show that speed matters quite a lot to users. When results appear in less than 250ms the user is much more satisfied than even 500ms. Anything less than a quarter of a second is thought of as "instantaneous" and the user starts thinking of it very differently.

Here, they are taking it down to less than 100ms, which is now operating faster than the user can even perceive (for that matter, it's faster than many users can type). So the real effect is that they have now eliminated the need to click on "Search". So now Google is even more interwoven into your thought processes, and other search engines are going to seem unbearably slow pretty soon.

[nanairo]

True. But you'll have to agree that such argument have a diminishing marginal return pattern. 500ms vs. 250ms may be great, but what about 100ms vs. 50ms? Once you reach the point my brain is the bottleneck, what's the point?

On the other hand it could be distracting to get something happening in the screen while you are thinking the best way to form your query. Usually when I am about to ask someone a question and that person tries to give me the answer much before I have finished, it can get a bit annoying.

So I am not convinced this change in speed will bring much benefit, and it risk (from the sound of it) to be distracting. However this is just my gut feeling. I'll still give it a try, and I am sure other people will have different opinions.

It's good to see Google trying to improve the search interface in any case.

[kwamenum86]

Experiments have shown that 100 Ms is the threshold.

[jyothi]

I think speed beyond a point doesn't add much to the experience. One would spend at least 2-5 seconds to check out the results and minutes to find the right article, few milliseconds would not matter.

Instead if they return 'good results' in 1000 milliseconds also I would continue to use them.

[kwamenum86]

If you examine the empirical evidence this is patently false. Milliseconds, on average, on the whole, in the long run, at scale, however you want to phrase it, do matter.

[jyothi]

in mission critical applications. I really hope there is some good competition for google.

I have to stress again on what the first parent commenter. I am a more genuine SEO person myself and sometimes it is just so annoying that google doesn't even invest in cutting down all the spam on first page result.

Almost seems like they are focusing just on the technical scale & adwords impressions. Given the talent at Google it shouldn't be hard to put in checks for gamers without anything useful on the site.

PS: disagree but down vote somehow doesn't make sense. There is nothing offensive or irrelevant in my comment.

[Eight]

For now

[daychilde]

The nice thing, though, is that there's an option to turn it off for those that don't like it.

I'm not sure if it'll prove to be too distracting vs. mildly helpful for me, yet.

[peterwwillis]

it's funny you bring this up because we were just discussing site performance at work today. what i took away from it is this: speed is mostly relevant when there's a competing product providing similar value and you risk losing business due to inferior user experience.

if google were far better than their competitors at providing what users want (relevant search results they don't have to dig through) they could take 5 seconds and it wouldn't matter. the added value of getting what you want on the first try at the top of the page would keep people using that product.

yes, 500ms can seem like an awful lot when you come from a world of 250ms. but if the results returned from the 500ms are significantly better, you bet your ass users will sit through double the time to get better, more reliable results.

[andreyf]

yes, 500ms can seem like an awful lot when you come from a world of 250ms. but if the results returned from the 500ms are significantly better, you bet your ass users will sit through double the time to get better, more reliable results.

Are you sure?

[lhnz]

Are we talking about opinions here? If so, I have mine, and: I agree with him. I might spend 500ms waiting for my search results but my greatest annoyance is still having to spend 10 minutes trawling through SEO 'content' to find a legitimate website.

[andreyf]

Are we talking about opinions here?

Sorry, that was the point. We could talk about opinions, sure. But all major search contenders do significant user research into how people will react to much less significant changes than Instant Search. This change had its but user-tested and dogfooded for quite some time.

[peterwwillis]

IANASEOE, YMMV, HBD, ETC. but for us, yes. the site of my company was balls slow yet managed amazing feats of capitalism, mostly due to a faithful userbase in the face of faster and cheaper alternative sites. value won out.

an example: Steam, the game delivery system, takes longer to deliver and properly execute games than it takes to buy one from the store, install it and run it. but you get more value from steam so people sit through hours or nights/days worth of downloading to run its games.

[andreyf]

Good point about Steam. It really does suck balls compared even to the vast majority of web apps. Ditto for iTunes: slow as balls sometimes, but I still use it to buy music sometimes.

Still, a competing product will win both over if it can get sub-100ms response time for all of their UI interactions. Buy and listen to a song? Imagine hearing it instantly after you click "buy & listen".

[dedward]

The results would likely have to be significantly different.

Google and others have studied the response time -vs- user stickiness issue extensively, and it's good stuff to read - users don't even know what they want.

Example (paraphrased) - the majority of users will say "I would rather see 20 results on the page than 10" - but actual A/B testing shows that the users shown only the 10 results (faster, less information to process) are overwhelmingly more likely to continue using the service.

What people think they want when asked is very often not what really happens in practice.

So if a search engine is giving you results you hate - response time is obviously meaningless - but otherwise, it's everything.

[bad_user]

> what i took away from it is this: speed is mostly relevant when there's a competing product providing similar value and you risk losing business due to inferior user experience

Even if you don't have competition, you leave the door wide open if requests take 5 seconds.

There's also indirect competition ... like a lot of people type the name of the service they want directly into Google's search box ... a practice which would stop if it took 5 seconds, because accessing your local bookmarks would be faster.

[_urga]

Less than 100ms is widely considered to be instantaneous. And it is instantaneous if you're coming from a world of 250ms. But people can in fact distinguish between 20ms and 100ms. A better definition of instantaneous, for the purpose of UI design, would be that 100ms is the threshold at which people start to take notice that something is NOT instantaneous. It's not enough to target sub-100ms. One has to target sub-50ms. Anything more than 50ms ruins the magic.

[thaumaturgy]

Yeah, funny you should mention that. One of my techs is on a job site and just called in requesting documentation for an older Avaya phone system. Googling for it was a complete waste of time. (Unfortunately, DDG couldn't fare much better.)

I find this is often the case when searching for "long tail" terms, like specific models of equipment. There are tons and tons of sites like this (http://camera.manualsonline.com/ex/mfg/headline/m/avaya/type...) at the top of the search results.

(Edit: And while we're at it, trying to find information on obscure error messages or documentation for software is at least as frustrating, but for a whole other reason: so many of the results are forum posts from years ago discussing an obsolete version of the software or error conditions that are no longer relevant. For a more specific example, we recently had an OpenSolaris server refuse to boot with the very helpful "Error 16" message; the only thing we could find were references to an out-of-date BIOS problem that no longer applies.)

Google is drifting very, very far from what they set out to do 11 years ago, IMO.

[Splines]

This makes me wonder if Google makes the internet susceptible to losing rare data. It's possible that the only solution to your OpenSolaris error 16 existed in a web forum that existed until only recently. If Google didn't exist (and people couldn't find the answer), it's plausible that more questions/answers on this topic would have existed.

Then again, you could always create a new post on your problem in the hopes of attracting the attention of someone who solved your problem, but I still wonder if Google unintentionally promotes knowledge-scarcity.

[smiler]

I do wish there was a human curated search engine. Eg everytime you search for something and you find a useless spam site, you can flag it and then it's removed from the search.

I'm sure something like that must exist already - does anyone know?

[sunir]

Google tried this. It was called SearchWiki.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-searc...

[nostrademons]

Or was called SearchWiki. It turned out that nobody liked or used it, so it was removed.

[gojomo]

I liked the small satisfaction I got from 'X'-ing out spammy sites!

[_delirium]

I would've used that more if X-ing them out kept them out! Afaict, it only removed them from that particular search, and if you searched again, they'd show up again.

[code_duck]

I believe it only had an effect on your personal view of Google. Otherwise, it would have been abused by competitors and 'SEO experts'.

[jsrfded]

blekko lets you slash out individual sites from the search results. The exclusion just applies to you so spammers can't downvote reasonable sites. Has been popular to eliminate ehow.com from results. ehow isn't enough over the line for us to ban from the crawl entirely, but a lot of people don't ever want to see them in their results.

we're still in private beta, but happy to give invites to anyone here who wants one. just email me rich at blekko.

[smiler]

Do you have a predefined list of 'These are SEO sites which add no real value' sites which I can include by default?

[jsrfded]

That's a good idea, thanks. We'll add something along those lines...

[CamperBob]

Then the spammers would use bots or cheap Chinese labor to downvote their competitors. It would just move the problem down a level. For this sort of thing to work, the curators must be trusted, which is expensive.

Such an engine might be worthwhile to a small subset of users, though.

[ugh]

Google is a large company. I’m pretty sure that they have a lot of people working on search quality.

This seems like a popular fallacy (Does it have a name?), probably a result of anthropomorphising companies. It’s hard for a human to solve more than one problem at once and if they do they have naturally less time for each problem.

Sure, there can be similar effects in companies but it’s certainly not inevitable, not as inevitable as with humans, anyway. We just don‘t know whether improvements in search quality suffered because of this new feature. It doesn’t strike me as something search quality people would typically work on, though.

[treeface]

It's called a false dichotomy or a false dilemma:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

[Experimentalist]

I have to disagree.

The "micro-sites" you are talking about, and the long-tail SEO people are complaining about, are nothing new at all. It's been common for SEOs to build and rank sites like that for at least 5+ years.

The difference is Google made a big change to it's search algo back in April and in my opinion it was for the worse.

It actually ranked bigger sites (bigger than micro-sites but not necessarily the biggest ones) higher for less relevant long tail searches, presumably to weed out the micro-sites.

So the difference between now and 2 years ago is you are getting a less relevant result list, not that you are getting an SEOd micro-site.

I have a medium-sized website which relies mostly on long tail SE traffic,

Contrary to what many are posting here about this hurting sites that rely on long tail-- my traffic is above normal today. I'm not seeing a decline due to this search change.

I also would not see it in Google's interest to have less long tail searches, since those tend to earn it more money.

[josefresco]

I think the damage to long tail searches was already dealt long ago when Google started auto-complete on the home page and before that when people started using a Firefox search bar. Auto-results only makes things faster.

This strikes me as very AOLish where people are encouraged to search for what everyone else is (aka AOL Keyword) as opposed to having access to the entire web, unfiltered.

[josefresco]

I switched from AltaVista because it was better AND faster. In the late 90's my Internet connection sucked and Google's lightweight home page helped. Yahoo! as I remember had already gone the way of the full portal experience which meant Google became the site for searching (Yahoo! for Chat/Email/Games). The good results at Google kept me there which reinforces your point.

[aik]

I live in Sydney and used DDG for a while, but mainly switched because Google returns noticeably faster for me and I noticed I became frustrated when waiting for DDG.

[edanm]

"I don't need search results that update live as I type. I need to find what I'm looking for."

You need to find what you're looking for faster. For you, that only means more relevant results, since (this is a guess) you're a quick typist. For slower typists, this kind of instant search could save a lot more than 500ms. It can save them 30 seconds, maybe even a minute.

It might also help teach people how to search. There's obviously some "art" to choosing the right search phrase, and this kind of "search as you type" can help people learn by doing in a way that's much better than before.

[dedward]

Even for fast typists - speed and response time affects your perception of the site subconsciously. The faster and more realtime it seems the more you are going to like it, even if you aren't sure why, or don't even think about it. You may not even realize why if asked why you like it better - but the statistics and studies are there and are solid - so this is likely a very good move on google's part.

[uxp]

The first few searches I queried google for this morning didn't have this instantaneous result feature. This afternoon, it did, but I didn't notice it until I actually became frustrated when I would change a query and click "search", and the results didn't change. It took me a minute to actually notice how the results were dynamically changing under me.

It may take a day or more to get used to, but it really does speed up the workflow.

[tolmasky]

Faster results may mean better results in an indirect way. If you accept that some searches will require multiple tries before getting what you want, then If you can see the quality of your search results as you type, you can get to what you want faster. Of course you may disagree with that premise.

[fbnt]

Agreed.

Seems to me that they're just trying to inflate the number of adwords impressions this way, and not helping me in any way with my search. And it's utterly distracting too. Excuse the negativity.

[jedc]

Why would inflating the number of impressions matter at all when Google makes money from clicks?

[fbnt]

Probability of some old man clicking one of the four different links kindly proposed on the top of the page by Google while he's typing his search query is higher than the probability of him clicking the only ad shown to him with the old search technique. I guess.

[EricBurnett]

Even if that were true, then the value of clicks would decrease, prices would drop, and a new balance would be achieved.

[gojomo]

But in the weeks or months before bidding behavior adjusts downward -- pure gravy for Google!

[dustrider]

I doubt that they did this for a short term (weeks of gravy) gain.

I also don't think that it's a case of increasing impressions. I do however think that it allows them to display more ads, and therefore increases the chances of an ad being relevant, and as a result more clicks.

Because you're now getting accustomed to the results changing as you type, having different ads appear as you complete your query is not more obtrusive than the core function.

As an example, searching for employment tribunal brought up about 5-6 different ads (just in the main results area, not counting the sidebar) whereas without instant, their inventory is limited to three.

I would say that where there are multiple options to a character sequence it gives them better value per ad as well as they can pick the ads that are worth more, until of course the character sequence excludes them.

So in the end, you've got increased inventory and better value per ad for Google, increased speed and responses to users. Win-win

Though there are more than two parties in the search ecosystem, the tail-optimised sites are going to be left out in the cold, not necessarily the small ones, but anything that relies on 2nd page or below the fold traffic.

This may or may not be a good thing for the internet, but it's going to hurt a lot of companies.

By the way, not sure if anyone else has noticed this, but it's got a definite sense of history enabled as well, with subsequent queries for the same terms being much quicker to latch onto the directions chose in previous instances.

[AlexC04]

You've really hit the nail right on the head for exactly what I've been feeling some sort of odd, decentralized anxiety about for a while.

While reading your comment I realized that was the problem. Google kinda sucks now because of people gaming the system.

But who else is out there? I'd probably switch my search if I knew where else to try.

[josefresco]

Use Bing, or DDG. A healthy search market means SEO companies have to target two (or more, go DDG!) set of somewhat unique rules which makes it harder to game. The fact that Google dominates means there's one playbook for most SEO.

Bing (or anyone) could really make some ground if they tackled the low quality content SPAM market as opposed to simply trying to be as close to Google as possible so people will switch.

How about some direct ads showing spammy searches at Google compared with clean results at ....

[laktek]

Maybe to duckduckgo.com ?

[AlexC04]

i'll try it for a week and see how it feels. :)

[moron4hire]

Given that "optimization" has a positive connotation in tech fields, I suggest that we rename SEO to PRE: PageRank Exploitation.

[dedward]

Unless you're on the business end of things and most of your new customers come from search engines - in which case optimizing your site, which offers the products people are actually searching for, to the top of the list (and aren't cheating with giant link-farms....). Good SEO has a lower CPA than just about any other kind of marketing.

Now, if we're talking about SEO where people are link-farming to spam pages just to get ad-hits and get ad revenue and other spammy behavior of no real value to anyone but the person doing the SEO.....i'm all for hte new classification.

[dedward]

You're assuming they were solving a different problem. Have you switched to a new search engine? If not, it's more likely (statistically) that you will stay with google longer because of this new feature - it's now faster and easier to mine through search data. Agreed it doesn't solve the search-spam problem - but nobody claimed it did.

[mtholking]

Agreed. Instead of getting users to better results and having them click through to the site, Google Instant seems to want the user to keep asking different questions until the answer is available in page title and abstract that Google presents.

[slowpoison]

Personally, you can always turn it off. It is probably useful for other people.

[patana]

You say that this the the wrong problem because you know what you are looking for. But think for a moment, there are lots of people who will put a name in the browser and obtain a lot of queries of people like them. So for people that are curious and like hearing rumours this is a nice tool.

Just an example:

What's new about sex?

Sex ....... (imagine the top suggestions)

What's new about my favourite singer?

What's new about my best enemy?

You .....................