[thomasd]

I believe they have Facebook envy and now wants to keep every visitors they get on the site for as long as possible, just like Facebook. This is a departure away from their original philosophy in which their goal was to send users to the most relevant site for the user query as fast as possible.

I hope they haven't forgotten that the reason Yahoo lose out to Google was precisely because of this. Yahoo switched their vision from a search engine to a portal, and their product search engine start to suck.

This is dangerous. The best ad platform (which generates the most revenue) are those that are most efficient at sending traffic to advertiser's properties. Facebook main source of revenue comes from mobile app install ads which direct users to the app store for download, and page post ads, which sends traffic to advertiser's website.

A change in priority to hold users as long as possible on Google search isn't very tenable in the long term.

[magicalist]

Google has been keeping users from calculator web sites with its calculator/unit converter since before Mark Zuckerberg even wrote Facemash[1]. A fairly obscure timer feature that only shows up when you search for a particular phrase is nothing like search portals of old, nor is this a departure from the different search result widgets they've had for a decade now.

This feels like a feature that the OS should have but most don't, and I'll use it like I use google as a calculator or as a dictionary: if it's faster to open a tab and put in the query than it is to launch a program or a particular page and start a timer there. I did the same thing when I was on windows and it was faster to ask google than to run "calc" and then do the calculation, and it was the same tradeoff when I switched to a mac and it turned out spotlight could do many calculations even faster with just a command-space.

[1] http://mentalized.net/journal/2003/08/12/google_rocks_my_wor...

[thomasd]

Agree. What Google did replaced plenty of functionalities that are available on desktop (math, spell-check, dictionary).

But their recent card-based solution to a lot of searches seems to show that they're trying to keep users on Google-owned properties. Try searching for a movie review. You'll notice that everything that pertains to the movie is shown on top and on the right. Clicking on actors lead to yet another google search result with another card on the right. In short, you're being kept within Google.

Does it get you the information you're looking for in as little time as possible? Absolutely. But they're doing this at the expense of the sites they took the data from.

[magicalist]

> But they're doing this at the expense of the sites they took the data from

That would be Freebase, which is what it's for.

I'm not really seeing your point for that example, though. Maybe for something simpler it would be true, but if I'm looking for a movie review, the information in the top right isn't sufficient for anything besides seeing a wikipedia summary, a screenshot, and some of the actors in it. Anything deeper would require clicks into the actual content, which is actually an apt analog to a simple timer not replacing anything of substance.

[jfoster]

You're right that they keep you on Google, and that they're taking market share from sites that used to serve such queries. From a consumer's perspective, it's possibly a better experience than it used to be, though. The only risk (which you alluded to) is that they lose focus on making a good quality search engine because they're too busy making little widgets. I don't think there's any evidence that's happening, though.

[welly]

Alfred app (http://www.alfredapp.com/) on OS X.

define <a word> 1 + 2 open <filename> etc.

It's "magical".

[taejo]

I don't think it's to hold users on Google as long as possible: it's to give users what they're looking for as soon as possible.

I was looking for a timer utility the other day. I googled "timer 10 minutes", and got back a list of options, with no way to choose one that was actually good (the top result claimed it had an audio indicator but it didn't work, so I ended up missing the end of the ten minutes). Likewise, I used to Google for weather forecasts -- then pick a site, wait for all its chrome to load, and then get my forecast. Now, I search for what I want and get it right away. If I don't like Google's version, I just scroll down to the search results.

At first, their only way to get users what they wanted was to get them off the site; the goal is still to get users what they want as soon as possible -- there's just a better way to do so now.

[cousin_it]

The problem with this approach is that when someone creates a better weather site and the Web decides that it's good, it won't become the top result, because Google's weather functionality is already hardcoded to be the top result.

The right solution is for Google to open up the SERP in a limited way, allow sites to put their widgets there and let them compete. This is tricky (tech, business, UX...) but it's doable and it would be better for the future of the Web.

[mmahemoff]

No, their original mission was to organise the world's information, and remains so. Search was just the first step and the one that became a cash cow.

Of course the timer sucks for the owner of the top-ranking timer, but I can't see how it diminishes user experience in any way.

[deong]

Yahoo! didn't switch their vision from a search engine. Yahoo! was a portal long before it was a search engine. In ye olden times, Yahoo! maintained a curated list of hierarchically organized links. That was their core product.

I would argue that Yahoo! lost to Google because Yahoo!'s business was in approximating a solution to a problem that users had, and Google came along and figured out a way to much more directly address that problem. Curated lists were better than nothing, and for a long time, it was the best thing available. Google simply built a new type of thing that made the old way immediately obsolete.