Today, Google finally brings out the highly anticipated big gun, instant search. This morning I was playing with the color changing doodle and read about how people think Google is making it clear that real time searching is the *future* direction. Not long after lunch when I wanted to know more about "Minnie the Moocher" (great song), I found out the future is here. Man, Google is fast...
Tried a few things here and there. Quite impressive, although I am still adjusting to the ever changing page, a little overwhelming. As I am trying to figure out the advantage of doing so, I can't help but recall a conversation I had with my ex-coworkers/friends when this came out. We had a fierce argument on whether the Google Search button and I'm Feeling Lucky button should stay there.
Besides the possibility of being overly minimalism, the point gets the most attention is whether there are relatively significant amount of people don't know you can hit Enter/Return to submit a form, in this case, to start a search. Finally, this argument is officially dead, and now let's get rid of the "excessive" buttons! (unless you turn instant search off, of course. By the way, I do love how easy it is to change settings for instant search and SafeSearch now)
Without a doubt, instant search is by far the best showcase for AJAX. More subtly, it makes "uncertain search" (much) easier. As a typical Gen Y'er, I have an incredibly short attention span, and am very purpose/result-driven. I hardly go to the second page of Google search results, and always want to find the best keywords combination and order so I can fill my need with as few search as possible. That's why when the suggestion came out, I wasn't sure whether I had been drinking or not.
Now? When I type in two misspelled words, I don't need to select one and hit Enter, and then type those two words (possibly still misspelled) again and hit Enter again. If I want to compare what I see and what I saw from last search results, I don't need to choose the first suggestion again. With a move of the arrow keys, I can keep changing between results returned by each suggestion, and instead of glancing through the whole first page for what I want before I change query, I can just look at the first three or five results for each search to convince myself which suggestion is more useful, and at which I should take a better look.
More efficient? Possibly. Reduce my attention span even further? Definitely.
Thank you Google. Where is the Google TV, by the way?
No comments:
Post a Comment