| I've found the combination of google instant plus the new previews to be impressively useful when using Google professionally. I'm working with clojure at the moment which is new to me, so I find myself doing a lot of rapid-fire Google searches to answer "is there a library for x?" or "how do I do y?" like questions. Before instant and preview, I'd typically do a search and then open a list of the most promising answers in tab - and then possibly do the same with other variants of the search. Then I'd use keyboard shortcuts to move through the tabs and close the irrelevant ones. Now, I've found that I can usually refine the search to a single good one using instant, by looking at the immediate feedback of the results being returned, and preview lets me quickly see which of the results are junk and which are actually salient before I even get as far as opening them in a tab. They've made an operation that I do many times a day considerably faster and more interactive and reduced the cognitive load. This is usability where it matters - bringing information closer to my mind so I can get things done quicker. Most impressive to me is that these improvements seem make a more significant difference for the long tail of professional work, rather than the more trivial searches for new products or celebrity gossip etc. I'm thankful to see Google choosing this as a priority. I'm reminded of the famous Steve Jobs story about faster boot times saving lives: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s... Google's saving lives too. |