I can now find out the weather, where I am, on Google with a single keystroke, by typing the letter ‘w’. Sound simple enough? This is a result of Google’s latest product launch Google Instant. Google Instant was launched on September 8th, 2010 by Google and claims that it will forever change the way people search.
VP of Search Products and User Experience, Marissa Mayer, hosted the Google Instant Launch event, along with Ben Gomes, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Arts this September. Marissa spoke about Google’s continued efforts in renewing quality and user experience at Google and how Google Instant ties in to those objectives.
Do you remember the Google Doodle with the bubbles just before the launch of Google Instant? The NY Times and other news syndicates even published stories about the Doodle wondering what Google meant by creating such a strange Doodle with no explanation as to its meaning or purpose. This Doodle did stir up a lot of propaganda and Google made note of this in its launch event.
The engineers behind Google Instant spoke at the launch and explained the tremendous amount of time and effort it took to build such a powerful product and all the challenges it entailed. Everything Google does makes it easier for users to search. With Instant, Google can now saves its users over a billion hours every year by this new enhancement in Google Search. The estimate is based on the product saving the average user 2-5 seconds per search, multiplied by several billion searches that are performed on Google every day. The improved interface and infrastructure is not only fast, but predictive in its understanding of search queries and their relevance.
Because Google tries to keep its main product family-friendly and safe for its users the Instant search feature does not return results for queries that may be related to adult content, for example. A guest at the event made note of this as she asked why her last name would not return results in Google Instant. The obvious answer being that the last name Slutsky contains the partial search term “slut”, which does return results for potential porn related sites, images, videos, etc… When Google Instant is unable to return results based on those unsafe search queries it will instead ask you to press enter to see the search results.
You can still click the Search button of course, but Google has added features to make search even easier by adding keyboard navigation. The up and down arrow keys will now run the search queries for the predictions returned by Instant and the right arrow key will function as the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. The tab key acts as the auto-complete, which also runs your query through Google Instant.
Since the introduction of the new interface does entail less mouse usage such as clicking buttons and scrolling through search results, Google plans to release this product to its mobile and other platforms within the coming months. This makes for less use of both typing and clicking in order to find what you’re looking for and anyone that uses a mobile phone to browse the Internet knows that isn’t always easy. Even with phones that offer qwerty keyboards, the process of having to type out long queries on Google may not be a quick task. This affirms Google’s intent to make the user experience easier, faster, and more meaningful, as co-founder Larry Page defines the worlds best search engine as ‘something that knows exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you need‘.
It’s important to note that Google is not search as you type. In fact, the actual search begins before your typing is complete. Since typing the letter ‘w’, all on its own, in Google has already alerted Google Squared to find the weather for my area (based on the Geo-location of my IP address), and generated other multiple possibilities for what I may be searching for, the search process may be completed before I’ve finished entering my query. This is what makes Instant so much different from a simple auto-complete search box. The results aren’t just based on all the possibilities in the index that begin with the letter w, but in fact, more predictively, what the most relevant search query would be based on the information available to Google so far. The odds that someone typing ‘w’ was actually searching for ‘w’ are so minute they aren’t worth considering, but of course if you really did mean to search for ‘w’ you can always hit enter or click on the search button to have Google display the results for that exact search query. Instant can always be turned off by clicking the link to the right of your search box, but I prefer to get my search results even faster from Google as I have found Instant to be very useful and interactive so far.