Kapow! And the web wakes up and scrambles over itself to play with google’s latest, pretty bold, innovation in search: search-as-you-type, or in Google-speak “Google Instant”.
The new feature combines autosuggest with realtime search. The video below demoes the functionality, and it’s live right now on the search giant’s homepage if you’re signed in to your google account.
Here are some quick and dirty first impressions:
- It feels like the autocomplete box is hiding the top results.
- You mentally shrug and think “hey, google’s suggestion is close enough” instead of typing the query you first had in mind.
- We’re not chameleons; we can’t look at the suggestions and the results at the same time. We need to look at the results to see if they’ve solved our information need, but we also need to look at the autocomplete box to see if there’s a good query refinement available.
- How will this affect adverts that are sold on a cost-per-impression basis? (3-seconds without query refinement counts as an impression? (Update: Bingo! This has just been discussed on the live QA video – 3 seconds.))
- The movement of the all important “top 3″ results to further down the page is a big change to well established expectations. It doesn’t feel like it’s giving good results, because I associate results that are half way down the page as less relevant. It’ll be interesting to see how user expectations change.
Here’s the official , and their , and a here..
Your thoughts, experiences, bugs, ideas for improvements, predictions for how this will evolve?
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