Google Instant Announced 408
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:5, Interesting)
On another note, a quick refresh rate can pull up some non-professional images if one isn't careful. For instance in typing latent dirichlet, 'la' pulled up a partially clothed/nude image of lady gaga.This might have been a bit awkward if safe-search wasn't on.
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Is it just me, or was google instant available before the /. story about the google light-up-letters story even posted? :confused look:
Yes, it is surprisingly fast, and it is great for relieving boredom. For example, I started typing llll, lllll, llllll, lllllll, etc., to see how long a string of l's I could make before it said "Press enter to search" and stopped giving me results. It seems like I needed a string of about 30 L's. It looks like the cut-off is about 5,000 hits.
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Is it just me, or was google instant available before the /. story about the google light-up-letters story even posted?
Google rolls features out early to random people for testing.
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Ah, but I wasn't signed in =)
Does google roll out to some IP blocks early, as well? Or randomly to some "users" as marked by cookie signatures?
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I got up to 100 Ls before it stopped (exactly 100, so I imagine 100 is the character limit). Some of them had ~3,000 results.
Re:You know what would make it instant? (Score:5, Funny)
On another note, a quick refresh rate can pull up some non-professional images if one isn't careful. For instance in typing latent dirichlet, 'la' pulled up a partially clothed/nude image of lady gaga.This might have been a bit awkward if safe-search wasn't on.
Searching for vagrants or penal colonies is definitely not recommended at work.
Re:You know what would make it instant? (Score:5, Funny)
Searching for vagrants or penal colonies is definitely not recommended at work.
I can see the issue with searching for "vagrants" but I never got any bad results for "Australia".
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Reminds me of that story about the retired englishmen doing his crosswords and then looking up on google '*non-domesticated* Asian *donkey*' (you can do the math replacing the ** words by equivalents)
Ah yes... feral asian equidae.
The other nice feature is hidden (Score:4, Informative)
in the panel on the left.
Select "more search tools" and then select "Fewer shopping sites"
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(Note: I'm not getting Google Instant yet, just ye olde fashioned guess-ahead autocompletion.)
When this was first rumored, I warned that "child por(traits)" might be unsafe to search for with this system, since it might guess along the way that you were looking for something... you shouldn't. Apparently they anticipated this, because the several autocompletion possibilities they offer for "child po" disappear altogether when you change that to "child por" (including "child portraits", even though it still
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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.
Re:You know what would make it instant? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You know what would make it instant? (Score:4, Insightful)
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One second * number of times I will ever have to wait for the thing to finish fading
Why... it could be as much as a dozen seconds across my lifespan
Re:You know what would make it instant? (Score:4, Informative)
But you can search before the fade in. The cursor is already in the box. Just type and hit enter.
The whole point of the fade in is to make sure there's no garbage coming between you and Google's main objective, search.
Re:You know what would make it instant? (Score:5, Funny)
Jesus Christ, then he'd have to move his mouse all the way to his bookmarks toolbar and click something !!!
HE DOESN'T HAVE TIME FOR ALL THAT SHIT !!!
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: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.
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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.
Re:You know what would make it instant? (Score:4, Informative)
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:4, Funny)
Of course not. I'll have blown a hole in my skull by then ;)
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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.
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They did not.
It works for Google (Score:5, Funny)
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:It works for Google (Score:5, Funny)
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Unfortunately it wouldn't help anyone fix their spelling mistakes.
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Let's just pray Slashdot never instates a "post as you type" feature.
Have you ever used talk (old command line program)? Could you imagine if the comments section was some kind of massive talk system. I wouldn't be surprised if someone is reading this thread right now who will go off and try to make it happen. I guess Wave was kinda like that.
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Have you ever used talk (old command line program)? Could you imagine if the comments section was some kind of massive talk system.
Given that my answer to the first of those is no, I'm going to have trouble with the second one unless you elaborate a little.
Or I suppose I could go Google it, but what am I? An animal? Googling my own information... to hell with that.
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Wasn't that Google Wave? And haven't they added that feature to Google Docs?
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Dear Aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all.
Wasteful requests. (Score:4, Interesting)
Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes
I think what they meant to say there is that there was a group at Google that had nothing better to do than make this happen.
All that instant searching thing can be helpful at times, but it can also be wasteful of bandwidth, CPU resources, etc. The only place were I've found it essential is on youtube search on my bluray player where I don't have a keyboard to type letters, it can savea A LOT of time. Of course, I normally type 80 words a minute.
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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.
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The secure version [google.com] still uses the more traditional approach if the new feature makes your machine cough and wheeze.
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I'm sure this will be updated in the near future to use a REAL transport protocol.
FTFY
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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:Wasteful requests. (Score:4, Informative)
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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.
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Oh yeah, amen brother. You know how many web pages now have images that are linked 1MB BMP files that could have been optimized down to 30k JPGs? Oh my god, and how many people now design sites assuming you've got a 1240 by 1024 monitor?
I still surf using a Pentium 3 and a CRT that doesn't support any more than 1024x768. Slowly but surely, I am being locked out of the web. I think it's high time to fire up the NeXT station, load up Omniweb and see what little still works.
What annoys me most is that the same
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They have an "off switch" if you don't want to use it ;)
Re:Yeah it's crap. (Score:4, Insightful)
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So ... turn it off? If there was no way to turn it off, you'd have a pretty good point... but Google seems to do ok with the allow-people-to-turn-it-off stuff...
For people who DO have a a relatively good connection, it's nice.
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.
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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 ~$60/month to get it.) I remember one of the things taught developed in the 90s and early 2000s was to "optimize" their pages to use as few kilobytes as possible - like squeezing GIFs down from 50 to 10KB. Apparently that paradigm got thrown out the window.
The paradigm of catering to the slowest and oldest has been replaced by pioneering new ground while at the same time including easy ways to turn off the extra features. If you would calm down for five seconds maybe you would see the link "Instant Search is On" with a dropdown menu to turn it off.
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Do you actually give a crap about your karma? I mean my entire oeuvre was to game the system and I don't even give a crap about it.
Re:Yeah it's crap. (Score:5, Informative)
Repeat that while logged in, so I can damage your karma the same way you damaged mine.
Do you mean by making you look like an idiot so people modded you down? Or are you presuming they moderated your post?
And there's no way to turn-off the annoying "popup" images that Google now uses during Image searches.
At the bottom of the image search page is a link "Switch to basic version". You're on Slashdot, figure it out from there.
No IE6 support (Score:2)
Google has locked out thousands of businesses that have never upgraded browsers. Of course, that's the new trend. Weather.com doesn't work with IE6 either. Pretty soon Slashdot will not support ^^&#$%&... NO CARRIER
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.
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You say that like it's a bad thing.
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Dropping IE6 is a good thing. It's hideous and not just aesthetically, but also from a security and standard support/compliance standpoint. I'm not advocating alienating all Internet Explorer users altogether (even though I quite dislike it), but dropping IE6 specifically is a *good* thing to do. Yeah some companies still force it on their users, shame on them (the companies).
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Google has locked out thousands of businesses that have never upgraded browsers.
Bullshit.
I Just tried a search on Google, and it worked just fine. The "instant search" feature wasn't available, but it was in no way "locked out."
If IE6 was "locked out" of Google Search, then it wouldn't return any results at all. Not porting a new feature to an obsolete program is not "locked out".
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It's live now, and (Score:5, Interesting)
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Doesn't do that for me. My Android phone can find my location easily, though.
Re:It's live now, and (Score:4, Insightful)
It's Easy! ...to disable! (Score:5, Informative)
Just go to the Google homepage, wait five years for the fade in, click "Settings" -> "Search Settings"
Find the setting for "Google Instant" (hint, bottom of preferences list), select "Do not use Google Instant" and press Save.
Now if there was some easy way to disable the horrible, over-scripted image result page layout I'd be a happy camper!
Re:It's Easy! ...to disable! (Score:5, Informative)
Somehow you missed the "Instant is on" drop down right next to the text entry field (to the right).
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Yup, though to be fair I am legally blind.
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If it helps, I use the regular http://www.google.com/ [google.com] address and I sign in to my account automatically. Tested with Firefox 4.0b4 and 4.0b5 on Snow Leopard.
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1) sign up for an account.
2) login over the next few days, try the features.
it's not brain surgery. hell, it's hardly even rocket science!
Useful, for slow typists. (Score:3, Interesting)
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If you type fast, and make that a plus point, why are you wasting time going all the way to the main Google page to do a search?
Censored (Score:5, Funny)
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Nice catch - just tested it. :P
Keep typing a normal query string - it will keep updating the page as you go, but then add "porn" at the end and all the results suddenly vanish! Even with safe-search Off!
Also, max string length = 100 chars, over 100 chars you need to press "Search", same as with "porn"
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They may just be keeping the results manageable for whatever buffering they're doing.
I mean, really, who looks for 'porn' on the internet? No one uses that generic of a term. That would be like using 12345 as the combination for your luggage.
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That's probably because they didn't want to be sued by some irate parent when little johnny was searching for hints for the game portal but as he typed "por" he was suggested porn.
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Don't drink the kool-aid. They put something in it, to make you forget. I don't even remember what I was searching for.
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Useless feature without porn.
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The suggestions must be ranked by popularity. After all, nobody looks for porn on the internet, right?
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Because I'm at work.
turn off safe search in your prefs and see what happens.
On an aside: :-)
We have a paranoid-strict content filter at work...
I turned off safe search and I think I just lit up IS's indicator panel like a Christmas tree
That was fun. Tons of little "this item was blocked" pictures as images tried to come up...
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Re:Censored (Score:5, Funny)
I prefer Google fresh brewed. (Score:3, Interesting)
Okay, what's different with this than having search results show up in the google bar on Firefox, IE or in my Android google widget?
So stupid on so may ways (Score:3, Insightful)
Now I have to deactivate JS on google, thank you very much.
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Does not work that way. (Score:2)
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."
By giving me partial results while I'm typing, you distract me, slow down my typing even more, and delay the good results I'll get from a complete query.
Ad revenue driver? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ad revenue driver? (Score:5, Interesting)
Talking about ad revenue, where do those suggestions come from? I typed "s" and the first three suggestions I got: skype, staples, sears. "e" - ebay, espn, expedia. "m" - myspace, mapquest, msn. Randomly tried typing two letters: "be" - best buy, bed bath and beyond, bevmo. etc.
Wouldn't some common word or a name of a pop star or whatever be the most likely thing people will search for rather than almost exclusively company names? Weird.
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"That's 11 hours saved every second." (Score:2)
Browser search bars (Score:2)
Pity the slow typer... (Score:5, Funny)
... who gets most of the way through a search for goatseller
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For those of you Complaining (Score:2, Informative)
If you use Google as your homepage there are options to disable at least this feature [slashdot.org]. However, I'm one of those crazies that just opens up the previous sessions windows, always mindful to close out potentially shocking or embarrassing tabs.
YMMV.
Re:So when did this happen? (Score:5, Funny)
What is this, the unofficial Google PR site?
Only when it's not an official Apple fanboi site
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You posted Anonymously... so you obviously do know that calling him a fucking moron was probably a bit harsh.... no?
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Remember that "Do you Yahoo?" commercial.
It turns out the answer is "No".