Live search, Instant search, Streaming search; I’ve already seen a myriad of different names given to Google’s latest experiment, where the results are instantly updated as you type. This isn’t the real-time suggested searches (which are relatively unobtrusive) you’ve been seeing for a while. This is where you start typing and the results show before you’ve finished the word. Then if Google finds something more relevant by the middle or the end of the word, it changes the results you see immediately.
Having a hard time visualising it? Not surprising given I was having a hard time explaining it. Check out this video from Rob Ousbey that shows you what I’m talking about:
Does anyone else hate this? I can’t stand to watch it let alone try and use it. I’ll tell you why I don’t like it; it reminds me of those people who try to answer your question before you finished the sentence, inevitably getting it wrong because they haven’t listened to the whole thing. I hate it when people assume they know what you’re talking about when they don’t, or wrongly guess what you were going to say. Why not just wait till I’m finished?
Now Google is trying to do it too, and the worst thing is the EXACT same thing is going to happen. You’ll only get the results you were looking for when you’ve finished typing the whole query in the majority of cases.
Plus this is going to end up getting people into trouble. What happens when I’m searching for Arsenal Football Club for an article at work and I get four letters in before I’m distracted by someone asking me a question? Admittedly I’d never search for Arsenal and I’ve left work but it still illustrates the point.
Anyway, apart from all that, how much stress is this going to put on the Google infrastructure if they roll this out to everyone? Google’s already said it handles around 1 billion searches a day, so adding dynamically changing results to EVERY ONE of those billion queries will surely slow down their response for certain geographic groups? Or, perhaps more likely, they’ve already thought of that and have a system so strong in place that not only do they know they can handle it, but they know other search engines (by which I mean Bing mainly) won’t be able to keep up with it and offer a similar service.
I’m really not sure I like this. Some bloggers seem to think this could ‘change the way we search’. I agree, if Google carries on fixing something that isn’t ostensibly broken, they will change the way I search, because I’ll be doing it on Bing.
Who knows. I didn’t particularly like the suggested searches when they rolled it out, but I don’t really have a problem with them anymore. They even occassionally offer some hilarious and borderline offensive suggestions, although the bores at Google have all but gotten rid of this. But I don’t like the Google comparison ads sneaking their way into our results and I definitely don’t like the instant search, or live search, or whatever you want to call it.
Someone has just told me you’ll be able to turn the feature on or off, so as not to annoy people like me. Kind of stepped on my rant a little but it seemed like it should be included. So maybe I won’t be Bing-bound for a little bit, but I still don’t like Google at the moment. Fuck it let’s all use Yandex.