Re:Google Tests a New Interface
by gruseom on Saturday June 18, 2011 @02:56PM
(#2669253)
I'm curious why you think that. I find Google Instant useful sometimes but more often irritating. It's jarring the way it insists on popping up at you. More interestingly, I find I'm acutely aware of all its tiny lags, the way it slows down and breaks up the simple experience of using a web browser. That's interesting because its speed is, in absolute terms, incredible; an engineering triumph by any standard. And yet all I notice are the ways in which it isn't instant.
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I find it very irritating for precisely the same reasons. The general instability caused by the momentary screen freeze and the breakage of back button(when all the hacks don't work) is extremely annoying. I was literally banging my head against my desk yesterday until I finally found a way to disable it for the duration of the session(no way to disable it forever).
Really for me it is trying to solve a problem I never had. I am not outrightly against making things even better than they are - but in my view, the solution has to be better without debate. The fact that there is a very proactive debate against Google Instant tells me it is far from being the finest piece of work by Google. Considering search is the heart of google, Google Instant should not have been pushed down our throats. It is at best something that should have spent a few months in Google Labs.
You can disable Google Instant in your search preferences: http://www.google.com/preferences
What browser are you seeing this instability on?
I find it really irritating for query refinement. Often I will do a broad search and notice a new term in the result snippets that I want to use in my search. When the term is a name or some other hard to spell word (or phrase), I like to be able to type it in the search box while I'm looking at it in the results. Instant ruins that for me, so I always turn it off.