Google Instant Announced 408
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the thats-faster-than-before-then-right dept.
from the thats-faster-than-before-then-right dept.
GCPSoft writes with this quote from a Google announcement:
"Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type."
You know what would make it instant? (Score:5, Insightful)
Getting rid of that annoying fade-in effect.
Re:You know what would make it instant? (Score:1, Insightful)
They did that.
Yeah it's crap. (Score:5, Insightful)
This "constant updating of results as you type" makes my Hotel dialup connection run even MORE slowly than it did before.
Even on high-speed DSL, it slows things down. Why can't these web developers get into their heads that not everyone has a 1 megabit pipe? (Or if it is available, don't want to spend ~$60/month to get it.) I remember one of the things taught developed in the 90s and early 2000s was to "optimize" their pages to use as few kilobytes as possible - like squeezing GIFs down from 50 to 10KB. Apparently that paradigm got thrown out the window.
Re:It works for Google (Score:5, Insightful)
If they did, at least all the "Candlejack will get y...... [no carrier]" or "I torrent all the time and the CIA has never knocked down my doo... [end of line]" posts would make *some* semse.
Re:You know what would make it instant? (Score:5, Insightful)
if you don't move your mouse and just have focus there in the window, it never fades in. or something like that. there's a trick.
you shouldn't *need* any tricks; but this is the modern google. they 'went commercial' and so its not the same as the old google.
So stupid on so may ways (Score:3, Insightful)
Now I have to deactivate JS on google, thank you very much.
Re:No IE6 support (Score:4, Insightful)
Google has locked out thousands of businesses that have never upgraded browsers.
I tend to see it has thousands of businesses denying themselves access to services because they aren't willing to upgrade. It's not Google's fault that businesses refuse to upgrade. They're going to be left behind, end of story. I stopped testing on IE6 a long time ago. People need to move on and upgrade if they expect to use all of the features of the internet, that's just a simple fact. You can't expect all of the newest technologies like CSS3 and canvas to work in IE6, it's just not going to happen, ever.
Re:Yeah it's crap. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So stupid on so may ways (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wasteful requests. (Score:3, Insightful)
yeah, it took 2.5sec to unfreeze the page while it was loading on my crappy firefox.
anyone here still uses the google front page to search?
i mean, browser has a keyboard accesible, always-there, box for search.
Ad revenue driver? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You know what would make it instant? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's live now, and (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:You know what would make it instant? (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally excessive fade effects annoy me because I spend a lot of time using tools like vnc, remote desktop, citrix ica clients, etc. Fades are generally slow, clumsy, and downright obnoxious when viewed remotely.
Re:Yeah it's crap. (Score:5, Insightful)
I was (and still am, to a degree) quite a rabid anti-bloat advocate. I cringe when I see 250k JPEGs used when a 25k PNG would have done better (esp. on non-photos, like comics, graphs, designs, maps) or when some idiot saves something at JPEG quality 100 when 95 would be indistinguishable to a human and yield a 60% space saving (btw, curse you Photoshop, and curse you Adobe, for Flash and your horrible PDF software (but not the PDF format!) while I'm at it).
I loved the Bandwidth Conservation Society website.
In 2003 I used to run some generated HTML through some old code beautifier which as a side effect auto-CSSized it yielding a decent space saving over raw, before serving it to browsers. And I'd still be doing it if I had to run a website, even if I was sure noone would notice the difference.
But I'd really have a hard time calling this new Google Instant thing a waste. It's a new gizmo which needs more bandwidth to perform a useful function. I'm not its target (I type *way* faster than their target audience, usually looking at neither the keyboard nor the screen until I press enter, and most my queries are through Firefox's search box since I just type Ctrl-K, searchtext, Enter, BAM, way too convenient (and works in Chrome as well) but I readily recognize it as useful to millions (maybe not those who just stare at their keyboard while they slowly hunt and peck, not even realizing their query / address was autocompleted 20 seconds ago, making me twitch at the sight of this daily absurdity. Never mind bookmarking the damn thing, or those newfangled RSS aggregators. Or the heresy of a keyboard binding :-) ).
Disclaimer: I'm totally a Google whore. Hey I even tried using Wave to do stuff. Once.
Re:You know what would make it instant? (Score:5, Insightful)
30 seconds in, I found it MUCH better to just get rid of the whole thing:
http://www.google.com/preferences [google.com]
Seriously... who made the decision to go with this? I suspect it's the same person that decided to ajaxify google images. Both are horrible, unusable things that just get in the way.
Re:You know what would make it instant? (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you one of the people that signs the online petitions every time facebook changes too?
If you're going to the google homepage, most likely you want to just do a quick search, in which case, the fade in eliminates everything else in the page and makes it easy for your brain to instantly narrow in on the search bar.
Now I know you probably also visit google.com to view their privacy policy, but you can just bookmark that if it's so important.
Re:Wasteful requests. (Score:3, Insightful)
The question is what do you have more of: Bandwidth and CPU, or time?
A lot of the time I don't know quite what search phrase I should use to get something that I'm looking for. The ability to start typing, maybe get what I'm looking for in the second word, maybe the forth, or maybe go back and edit the search, is nice. When running a single search for something known, it's slightly faster but mostly fluffy. But when you're really looking for something, it can be quite helpful.
Re:You know what would make it instant? (Score:4, Insightful)
If I wanted my search engine to be stuffed full of shit, I would have used yahoo from the 90s, then migrated to bing.
Ever since google started messing up their front page by, you know, adding stuff, I started using the firefox search box. This had the side effect of diversifying the search tools I use, and about:blank really is the best homepage.
Now call me a conservative whiny techie, but never having to see obnoxious random "experiments", and logo doodles ever again is a huge step forward.
Re:No IE6 support (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You know what would make it instant? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ever since google started messing up their front page by, you know, adding stuff, I started using the firefox search box. This had the side effect of diversifying the search tools I use, and about:blank really is the best homepage.
Now call me a conservative whiny techie, but never having to see obnoxious random "experiments", and logo doodles ever again is a huge step forward.
Yikes. You know that the default Firefox homepage isn't www.google.com, right? It doesn't have those "obnoxious random 'experiments', and logo doodles".
So, yeah..."conservative whiny techie" might be the better label of multiple labels that pop into one's head after reading that comment of yours.