Innovation and change at Google is a common thing. Their ever-changing logo is an obvious symbol of that.
Google Instant is being rolled out this week. It will become the default search mode/ For now Google users need to be logged in to their Google account to see Google Instant. One blogger describe the new Google search tool as "ajaxified."
Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) allows web pages to interact with users as they type. Google Instant begins suggesting search results to you as soon as you begin typing your query and modifies its suggestions with each new letter you type.
Instant v. Real Time
At least one major tech blog has made the mistake, so it seems important to explain that Google Instant is not real time search. Google does not seem to have changed the way it collects information. Its spider isn't crawling the Web any faster and the updates your favorite website made today still won't show up in Google for a few days (or perhaps a week). Google is displaying the same results it always has, just doing it differently.
Real time search is the idea that a search engine can update its results as the web changes. If a blogger posted something five minutes ago, a real time search engine will show it in the result. Twitter taunts Google with its success as a real time search engine. Of course, Twitter's search engine only searches Twitter. But that real time search allows users to know what is happening now (at least inside Twitter).
Google Instant is not a real time search engine. If you want to verify that, change your own blog and then check in Google to see if your changes have made it into Google. Google Instant is simply a change in the way search results are delivered to the user.
There's nothing new about the sort of Ajaxified instant search results Google is rolling out now. Yahoo did it five years ago, according to Search Engine Land.
Disappearing Google Features
With Google Instant, a number of features available to users in the past are now gone. The most glaring is that users can no longer turn off Google Suggest (the option where Google tries to guess what you're looking for and offer it to you before you actually complete your typing). Google Instant wouldn't be much good if it wasn't making suggestions. But a number of other features also disappear, and users are likely to miss some of them.
One big feature that is missing with Google Instant is the feature that suggests items out of your own Google search history. In other words, Goggle Instant makes your search results less personalized. The ability to search within a set of results is also gone; every search is an entirely new search.
The unofficial Google Operating System blog has a longer list of disappearing features.
Monetizing Ajaxification: More Ad Impressions
Few things happen at Google unless the revenue generation implications been looked at closely.
TechCrunch was quick to point out that Google Instant may be driven in large part by the opportunity to increase ad impressions on search engine results pages (SERPs). Google Instant means that there are more SERPs. Where before a search of an old musician (say, Cat Stevens) would have yielded a single SERP (and a single set of ad impressions to go on the SERP), now a new SERP apprears as each letter is typed - which means up to 10 SERPs for that particular search.
Whether Google Instant generates more revenue will depend on user behavior. Advertisers generally pay for click, not impressions. But if seeing more ads results in more clicks, revenue will increase.
Will Google Instant Save Time?
Google estimates that Google Instant will save 350 million hours of user time each year, Whether Google Instant actually saves time or not for you personally will depend on what sort of a user you are. David Naylor makes a good argument to the effect that Google Instant will slow down and distract almost all users. Since the individual user theoretically saves seconds (or less) on individual searches, it's not at all clear that people will perceive Google Instant as a time saver for them - even if it really is.
At the end of the day, it will still only deliver the same results it did before the ajax infusion. Some users will find it novel and entertaining. Some users will find it irritating. But without real time search result, Google Instant is just no big deal.
Greg Cruey - Greg Cruey is an educator and journalist. He works as an educational interventionist specializing in a small, rural school in Central ...
