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.
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.