Google has done a lot of research to show that speed matters quite a lot to users. When results appear in less than 250ms the user is much more satisfied than even 500ms. Anything less than a quarter of a second is thought of as "instantaneous" and the user starts thinking of it very differently.

Here, they are taking it down to less than 100ms, which is now operating faster than the user can even perceive (for that matter, it's faster than many users can type). So the real effect is that they have now eliminated the need to click on "Search". So now Google is even more interwoven into your thought processes, and other search engines are going to seem unbearably slow pretty soon.

On the other hand it could be distracting to get something happening in the screen while you are thinking the best way to form your query. Usually when I am about to ask someone a question and that person tries to give me the answer much before I have finished, it can get a bit annoying.

So I am not convinced this change in speed will bring much benefit, and it risk (from the sound of it) to be distracting. However this is just my gut feeling. I'll still give it a try, and I am sure other people will have different opinions.

It's good to see Google trying to improve the search interface in any case.

Instead if they return 'good results' in 1000 milliseconds also I would continue to use them.

I have to stress again on what the first parent commenter. I am a more genuine SEO person myself and sometimes it is just so annoying that google doesn't even invest in cutting down all the spam on first page result.

Almost seems like they are focusing just on the technical scale & adwords impressions. Given the talent at Google it shouldn't be hard to put in checks for gamers without anything useful on the site.

PS: disagree but down vote somehow doesn't make sense. There is nothing offensive or irrelevant in my comment.

I'm not sure if it'll prove to be too distracting vs. mildly helpful for me, yet.

if google were far better than their competitors at providing what users want (relevant search results they don't have to dig through) they could take 5 seconds and it wouldn't matter. the added value of getting what you want on the first try at the top of the page would keep people using that product.

yes, 500ms can seem like an awful lot when you come from a world of 250ms. but if the results returned from the 500ms are significantly better, you bet your ass users will sit through double the time to get better, more reliable results.

Are you sure?

Sorry, that was the point. We could talk about opinions, sure. But all major search contenders do significant user research into how people will react to much less significant changes than Instant Search. This change had its but user-tested and dogfooded for quite some time.

an example: Steam, the game delivery system, takes longer to deliver and properly execute games than it takes to buy one from the store, install it and run it. but you get more value from steam so people sit through hours or nights/days worth of downloading to run its games.

Still, a competing product will win both over if it can get sub-100ms response time for all of their UI interactions. Buy and listen to a song? Imagine hearing it instantly after you click "buy & listen".

Google and others have studied the response time -vs- user stickiness issue extensively, and it's good stuff to read - users don't even know what they want.

Example (paraphrased) - the majority of users will say "I would rather see 20 results on the page than 10" - but actual A/B testing shows that the users shown only the 10 results (faster, less information to process) are overwhelmingly more likely to continue using the service.

What people think they want when asked is very often not what really happens in practice.

So if a search engine is giving you results you hate - response time is obviously meaningless - but otherwise, it's everything.

Even if you don't have competition, you leave the door wide open if requests take 5 seconds.

There's also indirect competition ... like a lot of people type the name of the service they want directly into Google's search box ... a practice which would stop if it took 5 seconds, because accessing your local bookmarks would be faster.

I find this is often the case when searching for "long tail" terms, like specific models of equipment. There are tons and tons of sites like this (http://camera.manualsonline.com/ex/mfg/headline/m/avaya/type...) at the top of the search results.

(Edit: And while we're at it, trying to find information on obscure error messages or documentation for software is at least as frustrating, but for a whole other reason: so many of the results are forum posts from years ago discussing an obsolete version of the software or error conditions that are no longer relevant. For a more specific example, we recently had an OpenSolaris server refuse to boot with the very helpful "Error 16" message; the only thing we could find were references to an out-of-date BIOS problem that no longer applies.)

Google is drifting very, very far from what they set out to do 11 years ago, IMO.

Then again, you could always create a new post on your problem in the hopes of attracting the attention of someone who solved your problem, but I still wonder if Google unintentionally promotes knowledge-scarcity.

I'm sure something like that must exist already - does anyone know?

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/searchwiki-make-searc...

we're still in private beta, but happy to give invites to anyone here who wants one. just email me rich at blekko.

Such an engine might be worthwhile to a small subset of users, though.

This seems like a popular fallacy (Does it have a name?), probably a result of anthropomorphising companies. It’s hard for a human to solve more than one problem at once and if they do they have naturally less time for each problem.

Sure, there can be similar effects in companies but it’s certainly not inevitable, not as inevitable as with humans, anyway. We just don‘t know whether improvements in search quality suffered because of this new feature. It doesn’t strike me as something search quality people would typically work on, though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

The "micro-sites" you are talking about, and the long-tail SEO people are complaining about, are nothing new at all. It's been common for SEOs to build and rank sites like that for at least 5+ years.

The difference is Google made a big change to it's search algo back in April and in my opinion it was for the worse.

It actually ranked bigger sites (bigger than micro-sites but not necessarily the biggest ones) higher for less relevant long tail searches, presumably to weed out the micro-sites.

So the difference between now and 2 years ago is you are getting a less relevant result list, not that you are getting an SEOd micro-site.

I have a medium-sized website which relies mostly on long tail SE traffic,

Contrary to what many are posting here about this hurting sites that rely on long tail-- my traffic is above normal today. I'm not seeing a decline due to this search change.

I also would not see it in Google's interest to have less long tail searches, since those tend to earn it more money.

This strikes me as very AOLish where people are encouraged to search for what everyone else is (aka AOL Keyword) as opposed to having access to the entire web, unfiltered.

You need to find what you're looking for faster. For you, that only means more relevant results, since (this is a guess) you're a quick typist. For slower typists, this kind of instant search could save a lot more than 500ms. It can save them 30 seconds, maybe even a minute.

It might also help teach people how to search. There's obviously some "art" to choosing the right search phrase, and this kind of "search as you type" can help people learn by doing in a way that's much better than before.

It may take a day or more to get used to, but it really does speed up the workflow.

Seems to me that they're just trying to inflate the number of adwords impressions this way, and not helping me in any way with my search. And it's utterly distracting too. Excuse the negativity.

I also don't think that it's a case of increasing impressions. I do however think that it allows them to display more ads, and therefore increases the chances of an ad being relevant, and as a result more clicks.

Because you're now getting accustomed to the results changing as you type, having different ads appear as you complete your query is not more obtrusive than the core function.

As an example, searching for employment tribunal brought up about 5-6 different ads (just in the main results area, not counting the sidebar) whereas without instant, their inventory is limited to three.

I would say that where there are multiple options to a character sequence it gives them better value per ad as well as they can pick the ads that are worth more, until of course the character sequence excludes them.

So in the end, you've got increased inventory and better value per ad for Google, increased speed and responses to users. Win-win

Though there are more than two parties in the search ecosystem, the tail-optimised sites are going to be left out in the cold, not necessarily the small ones, but anything that relies on 2nd page or below the fold traffic.

This may or may not be a good thing for the internet, but it's going to hurt a lot of companies.

By the way, not sure if anyone else has noticed this, but it's got a definite sense of history enabled as well, with subsequent queries for the same terms being much quicker to latch onto the directions chose in previous instances.

While reading your comment I realized that was the problem. Google kinda sucks now because of people gaming the system.

But who else is out there? I'd probably switch my search if I knew where else to try.

Bing (or anyone) could really make some ground if they tackled the low quality content SPAM market as opposed to simply trying to be as close to Google as possible so people will switch.

How about some direct ads showing spammy searches at Google compared with clean results at ....

Now, if we're talking about SEO where people are link-farming to spam pages just to get ad-hits and get ad revenue and other spammy behavior of no real value to anyone but the person doing the SEO.....i'm all for hte new classification.

Just an example:

What's new about sex?

Sex ....... (imagine the top suggestions)

What's new about my favourite singer?

What's new about my best enemy?

You .....................