Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Google Instant: Search for the now generation

Google's decision to fix what wasn't broken is a bold bet on the future of search and the way people use the Internet.

Google Instant, which the company unveiled Wednesday, is a fundamental shift: instead of search as an outcome, Google is trying to get people to think of search as a process in which you constantly refine your query without actually "searching," or hitting the button to produce a concrete result.

Google is betting that in a world of nearly instant communication that search is going to have produce an answer just as fast as updates are spat out from Twitter or other real-time Web services. It's a bit chaotic at first and will certainly throw a few searchers off their game as well as make those in the search-engine optimization game a little anxious.

Should it prove popular with users, however, Google Instant is also the type of search innovation that might be difficult for competitors to duplicate in a matter of weeks or even months, giving Google a distinct advantage heading into a new era of Internet search.

Why reinvent the wheel, some might ask? After all, Google has dominated the search market for years with its current approach to search results, and even though its competitors have joined forces against a common enemy, Google is still a verb that means "to search."

While Microsoft and Yahoo deserve credit for keeping Google on its toes, most of those innovations have happened on the front end, or in the way search results are presented. Google Instant is a combination of front-end user interface design and the back-end work needed to process results for the suggested queries on the fly.

And at the moment, Microsoft and Yahoo are very busy on the back end of the search technology process. Can the two companies invest the time and money needed to replicate the back-end work that makes Google Instant hum? Had either company made this kind of breakthrough first, they might have really made Google sweat.

But they didn't, meaning Google will either cement its reputation as a search innovator should this take off or incur the wrath of users who liked things better the way they were. Google executives were careful to emphasize just how much they tested Google Instant with members of the general public--ostensibly to avoid gaffes like the Google Buzz launch--as well as the amount of time they spent preparing for the load on Google's infrastructure.

During Wednesday's presentation, Google revealed that it had been working on this type of instant search results for several years but faced huge challenges trying to make it work on their computing systems, which by most accounts is one of the most sophisticated on the planet. The first iteration of Google Instant increased the load on Google's servers by almost 20 times the level at the time, but through constant tweaks and improvements, Google was able to get the increase down to a more manageable two to three times the current workload.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20015902-265.html#ixzz0yzCuequ7

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