I remember, back when Instant was first ramping up staffing from prototype to production levels, saying,<p>"It's going to be a spectacular failure, but I am very, very glad that I work in a company where we can take risks like this."<p>(In my defense, remember that chart Google released today showing the resource usage of various incarnations of Instant? It was in the Prototype stage at the time, with a total cost roughly 10-20x existing websearch. We were talking about having to build new datacenters to support it. And the UI was nowhere near as polished; I found it very jarring to use at the time.)<p>I think there's a lesson for entrepreneurs in here somewhere: imagine where the technology <i>could be</i>, not where it <i>is</i>. Almost all innovations are pretty crappy when they first come out. That's a reason to improve them, not a reason to cancel them. Many problems that look impossible at first can be solved given enough engineering effort and creative thinking.<p>I think it also says a lot about the management style of Larry & Sergei vs. the MBAs at Yahoo. There's a tendency, as companies get bigger, to look at things rationally and say "We have $X to lose if this fails, and some uncertain $Y to gain if it succeeds. The chance of success is low. Let's not do it." Larry & Sergei say "Okay, we know what the risks are. $X is high but manageable, and $Y is unknown but potentially big. Let's do it."
As an ex-Yahoo!, this is <i>exactly</i> the sort of thing that cheesed me off while I was still working there.<p>Best memory: not being allowed to use javascript-enhanced sliding panels for pagination, as the reduction in full page refreshes when navigating would have negatively impacted the Ad Impression stats.<p>(That and the quarterly lay-offs. Good motivational tool, that one.)
This is a textbook example of Yahoo's problems as a company (I'm an ex-Yahoo).<p>It's all there: poor execution (performance/quality), insufficient focus on the user experience, focus on per-search revenue rather than long term search share, and above all no appetite for risk. Say what you like about Bing, but they are at least throwing caution to the wind and trying new and different things.
At the risk of sounding like a troll, I think the title is unnecessarily specific: yahoo didn't just drop the ball on instant search, photo sharing, social bookmarking, x, or y, or z. They just dropped the ball. Period. As has been extensively documented, Yahoo is a tech company that has never wanted to be a tech company.<p>Given a few more years, I'm sure they'll get their wish when they cease to be a company altogether.
Two points:<p>1. their UI was worse. If you don't do something like this right, it can be worse than doing nothing at all.<p>2. this depends largely on the correctness of the predictions. I assume Yahoo's predictions weren't half as good either.<p>But still cool, yes.
This was big news back then... for interface developers. Its popularity influenced a lot of further development (including spurring Google's AJAX Search API, I believe) and established it as a popular paradigm.<p>But I remember the version of it on Yahoo's then-beta search site, not this more extensive version on AllTheWeb. Here's an example: <a href="http://looksgoodworkswell.blogspot.com/2005/12/distracting-or-narrowing-looking.html" rel="nofollow">http://looksgoodworkswell.blogspot.com/2005/12/distracting-o...</a><p>I guess this was a more limited version of it, but it made a lot of sense to just pop up the most relevant result immediately.
This wasn't the only innovation in Search that Yahoo dropped the ball on. There were at least a handful of cool ideas implemented at the company, but there was a prevailing attitude of wanting to let Google be the innovator and simply follow in their footsteps (talk about insane).
I like the new Instant Search but I don't think I'll use it much. All my searches are conducted from search bars in Safari or Chrome where I just need to tap or tab to the bar and type. One thing that has changed my search habits recently though is the Safari 5 extension that lets you do mouseover searches where you highlight some text then a little window pops up with some search results and the start of the wikipedia page. So I can look something up without even typing or leaving the page/window. I take it this too has been done before? It's really 'game-changing' as far as my UX and interaction with search/ads goes.
I'm a fan of the idea of the Google interface.<p>But I don't think it could have made up for an inferior search. If you don't get what you want, you won't care how quickly you get. By 2005, Yahoo had lost on the basic search infrastructure side and even revolutionary interface wouldn't change that.<p>I'm not even much of a fan of the present implementation of type-ahead on Google. On my machine with an average broad band connection, all it does blank my old results till I've typed my new results. It could be because I'm using Firefox on Ubuntu. Still.