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The need for speed with Google Instant
Thursday, 9 September 2010
BBC - dot.Maggie: The need for speed with Google Instant
Google Instant is a product that has speed at the very heart of everything it does and where every second counts.
During its launch at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art, the company threw a slew of figures at journalists, analysts and bloggers that showed the average user takes nine seconds to type in a search query and another 15 seconds to choose which result to open.
Google Instant aims to put a rocket under those figures by dishing up results as you type.
In a quick one-letter experiment, when I typed in the letter "A" I was offered a choice of "Amazon, AOL or Apple" on a drop-down list. For "B" I got "Bart (Bay Area Rapid Transport) and Best Buy". "C" was Craisglist and "D" it was DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles).
All very random and quick but Google's head of search Marissa Mayer told me one-letter queries are not the greatest way to yield the best results.
"Typing one letter doesn't give the greatest signal of what is intended so popular companies may well pop up as the offering," said Ms Mayer.
"The first letter game is fun. We call it the alphabet according to Google Instant. It is
actually probably better in terms of an experience if you give us two or three letters. We are able to predict that much better what you are likely to be looking for."
When Ms Mayer typed in "SFM" she got San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which is what she was looking for.
Instead of hitting return/enter or clicking the search button, Ms Mayer hit the tab button.
Using Google Instant can shave as little as two seconds and as much as five off a search query. All those seconds add up.
"With Google Instant, we estimate that we'll save our users 11 hours with each passing second!" said Ms Mayer.
If you are interested that is 3.5 billion seconds a day and 350 million hours a year.
Naturally Google wants you to spend all that saved time searching using its search engine and not wandering off to Facebook to get answers through your social graph or going to the likes of Twitter and using its search function.
But seriously, will a second or two here and there really change user behaviour?
Believe it or not, every second really does matter, said Ms Mayer, who told me about a failed experiment back in 1999/2000 that Google conducted into the number of blue links or search results that it delivered.
"We did the experiment and it was disastrous. People who got 20 results by default searched a lot less and people who were getting 30 results were searching 25% less in six weeks."
Ms Mayer said they scratched their heads trying to work out the root of the problem because users had said they actually wanted more links to show up on the page. They poured over the results and the answer was soon revealed in the data.
"We took the logs and tried to understand how the experiment group was different from the control and the answer was time. It took us about 500 milliseconds more to do 30 results instead of 10.
"But if you can imagine 500 miliseconds of increased latency is about 25% of Google search traffic over 6 weeks. They probably weren't able to articulate that 500 millisecond difference yet it made a big difference in their overall behaviour. We think speed really matters."
The hyperbole surrounding the launch of Google Instant was impressive. Ms Mayer referred to it as a "fundamental shift" and a "quantum leap" in search.
"There have been other large changes in search. Google PageRank for example, that ability to get first results right in a lot of cases. Our launch of universal search in May 2007 was another such change - this idea we would have mixed media result pages and when we launched we were probably only triggering universal search on 3 to 5 % of queries and today we serve about 40% of our queries with universal results.
"When we look at the future of search there are generally three axis these things progress along. Interactions. Comprehensiveness. Understanding.
"For a lot of the features and a lot of the changes we make, they really only move forward on one axis at a time. Google Instant is interesting because it actually moves the ball forward on all three of those areas. It is a totally new way of interacting with the search engine."
A number of the analysts and bloggers I spoke to at the event were pretty positive about Google Instant but one or two voiced concern about what it will mean to search engine optimisation - the art or science of choosing the right keywords so a site or link floats to the top of the results page.
Industry watcher Steve Rubel reckons Google Instant is an SEO killer.
"No two people will see the same web. Once a single search would do the trick - and everyone saw the same results. That's what made search engine optimization work. Now, with this, everyone is going to start tweaking their searches in real-time. The reason this is a game changer is feedback. When you get feedback, you change your behaviours."
This means if results for your site are on page two, users who might have previously scrolled through to get the answer they are looking for are unlikely to go past that first page as they alter their search query on the fly.
Matt Cutts at Google who blogs about SEO said Google Instant does not sound the death knell for SEO but it will have an impact.
"I think over time it might. The search results will remain the same for a query, but it's possible that people will learn to search differently over time. For example, I was recently researching a congressperson. With Google Instant, it was more visible to me that this congressperson had proposed an energy plan, so I refined my search to learn more, and quickly found myself reading a post on the congressperson's blog that had been on page 2 of the search results.
" But that doesn't mean that SEO will die. I've said it before, but SEO is in many ways about change. The best SEOs recognize, adapt, and even flourish when changes happen."
Of course if you don't like Google Instant, you can always turn it off.
Thursday, 9 September 2010
BBC - dot.Maggie: The need for speed with Google Instant
Google Instant is a product that has speed at the very heart of everything it does and where every second counts.
During its launch at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art, the company threw a slew of figures at journalists, analysts and bloggers that showed the average user takes nine seconds to type in a search query and another 15 seconds to choose which result to open.
Google Instant aims to put a rocket under those figures by dishing up results as you type.
In a quick one-letter experiment, when I typed in the letter "A" I was offered a choice of "Amazon, AOL or Apple" on a drop-down list. For "B" I got "Bart (Bay Area Rapid Transport) and Best Buy". "C" was Craisglist and "D" it was DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles).
All very random and quick but Google's head of search Marissa Mayer told me one-letter queries are not the greatest way to yield the best results.
"Typing one letter doesn't give the greatest signal of what is intended so popular companies may well pop up as the offering," said Ms Mayer.
"The first letter game is fun. We call it the alphabet according to Google Instant. It is
actually probably better in terms of an experience if you give us two or three letters. We are able to predict that much better what you are likely to be looking for."
When Ms Mayer typed in "SFM" she got San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which is what she was looking for.
Instead of hitting return/enter or clicking the search button, Ms Mayer hit the tab button.
Using Google Instant can shave as little as two seconds and as much as five off a search query. All those seconds add up.
"With Google Instant, we estimate that we'll save our users 11 hours with each passing second!" said Ms Mayer.
If you are interested that is 3.5 billion seconds a day and 350 million hours a year.
Naturally Google wants you to spend all that saved time searching using its search engine and not wandering off to Facebook to get answers through your social graph or going to the likes of Twitter and using its search function.
But seriously, will a second or two here and there really change user behaviour?
Believe it or not, every second really does matter, said Ms Mayer, who told me about a failed experiment back in 1999/2000 that Google conducted into the number of blue links or search results that it delivered.
"We did the experiment and it was disastrous. People who got 20 results by default searched a lot less and people who were getting 30 results were searching 25% less in six weeks."
Ms Mayer said they scratched their heads trying to work out the root of the problem because users had said they actually wanted more links to show up on the page. They poured over the results and the answer was soon revealed in the data.
"We took the logs and tried to understand how the experiment group was different from the control and the answer was time. It took us about 500 milliseconds more to do 30 results instead of 10.
"But if you can imagine 500 miliseconds of increased latency is about 25% of Google search traffic over 6 weeks. They probably weren't able to articulate that 500 millisecond difference yet it made a big difference in their overall behaviour. We think speed really matters."
The hyperbole surrounding the launch of Google Instant was impressive. Ms Mayer referred to it as a "fundamental shift" and a "quantum leap" in search.
"There have been other large changes in search. Google PageRank for example, that ability to get first results right in a lot of cases. Our launch of universal search in May 2007 was another such change - this idea we would have mixed media result pages and when we launched we were probably only triggering universal search on 3 to 5 % of queries and today we serve about 40% of our queries with universal results.
"When we look at the future of search there are generally three axis these things progress along. Interactions. Comprehensiveness. Understanding.
"For a lot of the features and a lot of the changes we make, they really only move forward on one axis at a time. Google Instant is interesting because it actually moves the ball forward on all three of those areas. It is a totally new way of interacting with the search engine."
A number of the analysts and bloggers I spoke to at the event were pretty positive about Google Instant but one or two voiced concern about what it will mean to search engine optimisation - the art or science of choosing the right keywords so a site or link floats to the top of the results page.
Industry watcher Steve Rubel reckons Google Instant is an SEO killer.
"No two people will see the same web. Once a single search would do the trick - and everyone saw the same results. That's what made search engine optimization work. Now, with this, everyone is going to start tweaking their searches in real-time. The reason this is a game changer is feedback. When you get feedback, you change your behaviours."
This means if results for your site are on page two, users who might have previously scrolled through to get the answer they are looking for are unlikely to go past that first page as they alter their search query on the fly.
Matt Cutts at Google who blogs about SEO said Google Instant does not sound the death knell for SEO but it will have an impact.
"I think over time it might. The search results will remain the same for a query, but it's possible that people will learn to search differently over time. For example, I was recently researching a congressperson. With Google Instant, it was more visible to me that this congressperson had proposed an energy plan, so I refined my search to learn more, and quickly found myself reading a post on the congressperson's blog that had been on page 2 of the search results.
" But that doesn't mean that SEO will die. I've said it before, but SEO is in many ways about change. The best SEOs recognize, adapt, and even flourish when changes happen."
Of course if you don't like Google Instant, you can always turn it off.
