Google Instant Revealed the Googley Way
September 24, 2010
Google revealed the secret of Google Instant to Technology Review. Point your browser to “Why Google Went Instant.” Here’s the trick, sort of:
Othar Hansson, tech lead for the feature, says that loading search results as you type only uses a few thousand bytes of data for each new set of 10 results and any text-based ads targeted to the search. “The people that manage our traffic barely even blinked when we said we’re going to have this effect on search traffic,” he said in a phone interview, “because we have this other thing called YouTube.” The five to 50 kilobytes of data in a new set of search results, even if they include image thumbnails, are tiny compared to even one second of online video. The real magic in Google Instant comes largely from advances in data-center hardware in the past 18 months, Hansson said. Faster servers and fatter connections between them are coupled with new tricks for caching the results for the majority of Google searches. Most searches typed by users aren’t very original. So when you type “bat” into Google, it’s statistically almost certain you’re going to keep going and type an additional “man” into the box. Rather than wait for you, Google sends over the results for “batman.”
The service is a great demo of Google’s computational and technical wizardry. My take on Instant is that there were three factors pointing the Googlers toward such a dramatic change:
First, Google wanted to do something to boost revenues. Instant seems to reward big sites and content that is popular.
Second, Instant derails some small site operators’ efforts to appear high in a Google results list. The reason is that a company associated with a broad term like “services” now has to work really hard or buy AdWords to get traffic
Third, Google made a splash, capturing the spotlight from the pesky companies who are now identified with hot products and services.
Did Google succeed? I turned it off. Your mileage may vary.
Stephen E Arnold, September 24, 2010
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