Google Instant Search Released

I'm sorry, but this is a solution to the wrong problem.<p>I switched from AltaVista to Google back in 1998, not because their search engine returned results more quickly, but because their results were <i>much more relevant</i>.<p>In the past few years, SEOs have set up micro-sites on just about any topic I could possibly search for and they've managed to rank highly for those topics. Am I the only one who's sick of being taken to these shallow landing pages smothered in ads? Does anyone else think Google's search results are now <i>far less relevant</i> than they were 5 years ago?<p>I don't need search results that update live as I type. I need to find what I'm looking for.

I think this little change is going to fundamentally change the internet landscape.<p>a) no more long tail keywords. those people will see an answer before they get to the part of the phrase that makes it longtail(so if you ranked for that 5 term keyword...too bad). i.e. if you rank for "best auto insurance companies", you've now lost all your business to those who rank for "best auto insurance"<p>b) much faster searching for users = less traffic for you. If you are below the fold...chances are that you are screwed. Why bother reading below the #5 result...if I can just add a few more keywords to narrow my search? Basically the scrolling is going to take me longer, than it is to adjust my search phrase.<p>c) much more focus on auto-complete. Before you'd see some auto-complete strings, that would show only 2-3 hits a month according to Google. But now this same string might get a few thousand, just because people are automatically shown those results.<p>Overall I find that it's good for users, good for high ranking websites, and bad for everyone else.<p>This is going to make the SEO thing much more competitive, since it essentially eliminates the long tail.

My opinion is that this is a challenge to Microsoft. <i>"So you want to compete in search, well match this! See whether your server infrastructure can hold up!"</i><p>Having used the feature for a while, what I've found is that I basically don't finish typing. I just stop when I have good enough results. At first I found it annoying, but after I got used to it I found it very nice. Now I find myself annoyed that it isn't built into chrome's search bar.

Speaking from a UI standpoint, I find the leap of the bar from the middle to the top of the screen to be very disorienting. I know that the middle-of-the-page input field is a real visual trademark for Google, but if they want to push this feature, they might have to move the box up to where it is currently leaping.

One of the main issues for advertisers (as far as I can tell) is that this increases competition for the keywords which Google predicts first, and decreases traffic for the other keywords.<p>This already happened with Google Suggest, but I think that Instant search will result in even more users only interacting with the first suggestion.<p>For example, the term "social networking" will now get far more traffic than "social network", because it appears first. If I wanted to search for "social network", I can't just type it, I have to type it, press down, then press enter. Otherwise, I'm still searching for "social networking".<p>It creates more of a winner-takes-all market in search terms.

Not sure if this was covered elsewhere, but this actually changes the SEO game in a subtle way. imagine you could rank for the term online deg but NOT online degree.<p>SEO's rejoice, this could be profitable for consultants and linkbuilders.

Could you please link to the actual announcement, not the front page of Google?<p>Google release their products incrementally, so not everyone has access to new features at the same time.<p>There's others in the thread who also don't have this in their locale yet and are also reduced to guessing.

I'm really curious how they will count ad impressions in this new system. Can anyone find any comments on that? Google is CPC, but the number of impressions has a dramatic impact on price.

This is a logical extension of the trend to do ever more computation on every key press. Think spelling correction and auto-complete. But here instead of just a local process every key press invokes hundreds of remote machines, required to assemble a single search results page. It's impressive and decadant to think your cat walking accross the keyboard can light up whole racks of remote machines.

I think this is Google's way of training the average user to search like a pro. Many people don't understand that sometimes it takes multiple queries to find what you need. This seems like an extremely effective way to communicate that and encourage users to fiddle with their queries.

This change has the brilliant side-effect of coaxing users to give more specific descriptions of what they are searching for.<p>Before instant search, a search term was sufficient if it brought up the desired result in the first page or two, but now users will continue typing until the page they are looking for appears in the first two or three results.<p>Google could (for example) use this info to come up with better descriptions for subsets of ambiguous searches, improving the relevance of search suggestions.

They're talking about it live right now <a href="http://www.youtube.com/google" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/google</a>

And it doesn’t break the back button! I was a bit worried about that but you can either make a ‘snapshot’ of the current search results by pressing enter or clicking the search button (just like before only without page reload) or by just waiting a short time (about three seconds), presumably so as to not clutter up your browser’s history.<p>It’s a really smooth experience and they seem to have though of everything.

This is really cool, though I think I'd have to change my search habits dramatically to really benefit from it. It'd probably be better suited for people who don't know exactly what they're searching for. Then again, I wonder if it would just confuse them further.

I for one turn off google suggestions on every new pc/browser I use, it is a distraction to me and actually causes me to type slower. Maybe because I've been in front of a computer constantly for 15 years but I can type my term much faster than being distracted by results and clicking on the dropdown for them.<p>I just wish I could disable this account wide so every time I clean my cookies/cache in Firefox I don't have to go back to preferences and turn it off again.

Do we really need this? Isn't the time it takes to finish a query the last problem on our hands? Or am I just a spoiled fast typer?

That is genuinely impressive. Never seen anything like it before on any other website. Not sure it's needed now with the great autocomplete but it sure looks really great.

Try typing "fuc" -- it's smart enough not to be instant :)

So how long before we can buy our way to the top of the search term suggestions? What kind of analytics can you do about how streaming search changes the way people compose their keywords? It's an interesting new feature.

Multiple submissions on the same subject:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672391" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672391</a> &#60;- This one<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672388" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672388</a> &#60;- This is an explanation<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672346" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672346</a> &#60;- First

Well, it's impressively fast, however, I'm not sure I will ever get to use it considering I do most of my search from the Google Chrome Omnibox and very rarely visit the actual google homepage...

I often use Google to search for very specific phrases -- error messages, for example, in quotes -- and that doesn't help. It actually hurts.<p>What hurts even more is that Google returns documents that don't contain all the search terms, but where the missing search terms can be found in incoming links (or so it says).<p>If you try to use the allintext: parameter you're almost always considered a bot (why??!?) and your queries get delayed or you're shown an indecipherable captcha (they're getting harder, or maybe I actually am a bot, because nowadays I fail to solve every other one).<p>It seems Google is aiming at some lower common denominator of the general public, someone who can't spell, can't type, can't be bothered to learn a basic search syntax and just wants to know where to buy the latest gadget.<p>There is a space to be filled for a "Google for grownups".

The shortest link to the explanation, for those of us who don't have javascript turned on by default and want to read about it, or who don't see the new interface:<p><a href="http://www.google.com/instant/" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/instant/</a><p>"Google Instant is starting to roll-out to users on Google domains in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia who use the following browsers: Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac and Internet Explorer v8."

This change may be helpful for users, but will be even more for Google advertisement programs. Basically, they can show more advertisements for each user visit.<p>For example: user starts typing a long tail keyword search and an unrelated result is displayed. Even though the user was not looking for that specific keyword combination, he will see the results (and the ads) for that keyword.

Will some integration be done for those of us that search on the Chrome navigation bar instead of opening google.com in the first place?

The instant results seem to be served from memory rather than an actual search being performed. For example, try searching for:<p>zqqx<p>and after the 'x' is typed, no instant results appear. However, Pressing 'enter' to submit your search will show you the full results.<p>A new Google game: what's the shortest non-blacklisted key sequence that returns 0 instant results.

Looks like "q" is the starting letter for your project name if your punting for it to be the next big thing.

Auto-complete/Tab complete is priceless! Feels like I'm using Vim on google.com. Thank You!

Annoyingly busy. I sort of feel like this is a prime example why you don't put engineers in charge of UI. Just because we can is not a good enough reason to do it.<p>Also, having both a dropdown and a whole page refresh, what?

kind of cool, but I immediately turned mine off.<p>I could imagine using it in some situations though, when I am really digging for some information and not expecting my query to bring my desired result to the top few spots.

The real question is... will this increase or decrease Google's revenue through Adwords on the result pages?<p>They will for sure show more ads, maybe making chances higher for a user to click an ad, but at least for me, after trying it out a bit, it seems like I focus more on the results themselves when typing, as they change all the time, without giving attention to the ads.<p>And as already mentioned, long tail searches might be used less often, so you cannot buy cheap uncompetitive ads to drive traffic to your site, you have to use the big keywords that are suggested.

Is Auto-Complete Optimization something SEOs already focus on? For example, trying to get the keywords they rank well on placed relatively higher in an auto-complete list for Google, Bing, etc?

From their FAQ page <a href="http://www.google.com/instant/" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/instant/</a><p>* 15 new technologies contribute to Google Instant functionality.<p>Does anyone know which are these new technologies?

Why would I want Google to begin searching at 'he' if I'm looking for 'hello world'? Will the instant search list relevant results so early on, so as to save me from typing the whole term?

I work at a company where we have been doing this sort of stuff for a while now. It's very impressive in the case of Google because of the size of its index and the level of error tolerance of the matching sequence used. I wonder how complete these instant results are compared to the now lame old click-to-submit search results? I tried to test and noticed the count of instant results is slightly smaller but the top items appear to be the same most of the time. Anyone has insights?

This is pretty mentally jaring, I realized how much searching is a process that I had practiced in certain way for long time. In a couple minutes playing with it , I found myself figuring out how to search for something again. I know there are objections to the UI, or whether it actually improves the search results, or whether the speed increase is worth it but just from a mental perspective it has made me realize how the act of searching is wired into my thought process.

Try typing 'F#', the instant results are irrelevant to F# the language (probably due to the # symbol), but when you click search they become relevant.<p>I would prefer it to be consistent :)

In my opinion, this is the same kind of Google-think that brought about Google Wave. It's extremely impressive, no doubt, but it doesn't seem like something users were clamoring for.<p>Just as Google will learn a lot from Google Wave despite its low usability, so will it learn a lot from this, whether users really want or use it or not.<p>Only time will tell if Google's engineering-centric culture will ultimately win for it in the end. Its been all wins so far, hasn't it?

My question is how will this and previous auto-complete moves by Google effect the "long tail" search market. Will this reduce the number of truly unique queries and instead group people into already existing term categories? I know auto complete has been in effect for a while, but I wonder if this will only make it even more effective, thereby changing user behavior and simply re-enforcing the already existing terms.

Google Instant will make Google's Web History less useful (if it was of any use before) and easier to trick, since the History records only if you actually press Enter after the query or if you click a results. However a lot of information can be revealed from the description of the results that Google offers and so people won't always have to click Search to get the info they required.

Well that was interesting. I started migrating my blog from TypePad to WordPress last week and it's been "down" or intermittent since then. What's amazing is that Google has erased 5 years of really highly ranked search results.<p>For example I had the #1 or #2 result for "liquidation preference" and now it's nowhere to be seen. I wonder if the "real time" will turn Google into Twitter...sad if true.

Bing Instant? : <a href="http://www.istartedsomething.com/livesearch/" rel="nofollow">http://www.istartedsomething.com/livesearch/</a>

Anyone else find the constantly refreshing search results annoying? If so, do you know of any cognitive psychology literature to explain why? I personally find this instant search infuriating and just want my standard old Google search back, where things do NOT change unless I'm mentally prepared for them to change.

I keep thinking that Google is on a mission to make us lazy. What after Instant search? Google Mind Reading Search!

am i overlooking something, or is there no way to use the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button now?

Strangely, it's not working yet for me in Chrome (dev channel) but it works in Safari 5.

This doesn't work at all for me in Opera. Has anyone else had success in Opera?<p>edit: Apparently Opera is not among the browsers listed here: <a href="http://www.google.com/instant/" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/instant/</a>

I wonder if this will cause average users to begin understanding and using the "tab complete" interaction. That could open up interesting uses in all kinds of apps.

I hate this and thought I'd bumped something this morning when I discovered this "feature" accidentally.<p>Really distracting the jarring transition.

This looks more like a "labs" feature than a real improvement. Doesn't add any value to me... glad they allow us to disabled it.

Does anyone know of a firefox plugin that will allow us to blacklist sites we don't want to see in our google search results?

Just 'w' will give weather, but with an extra 'w' ww will give 'facebook.com' as the first result, that's interesting.

&#60;smartass&#62;I like the way it instantly changes my C# queries to C in the suggest list.&#60;/smartass&#62;

This would be awesome on image search.

I'd really like to use the arrow keys to navigate the results instead of the suggestions.

I love it. This makes it much quicker to edit and tune your query to get what you want.

interesting UI issue/inconsistency (in Chrome)... when pressing tab, it can either complete the current word/phrase or move to the X, so &#60;enter&#62; can either do nothing or clear the search box

So, does the referrer still include the keyword phrase used?

Google Instant Search is just too distracting.

This is a total ripoff of keyboardr.com.

what does "?sclient=psy" mean?

Instead of writing a lengthy comment on HN, I wrote a blog post: 9 Ways SEO Can "Best" Google Instant: <a href="http://goo.gl/ez2a" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/ez2a</a><p>It's a spicy title I'll admit, and guaranteed to raise the ire of some HN folk, but that was not my intension.

I think saving time sales point is the biggest bullshit from G. Google should be more honest to there users. They should tell us that they need more page impressions+ads.