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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/09/08/BU8O1FAHE7.DTL
James Temple, Chronicle Staff Writer
San Francisco Chronicle September 8, 2010 02:18 PM
(09-08) 14:18 PDT San Francisco -- Google Inc. unveiled a major upgrade to its search engine on Wednesday, showing off a new feature that promises to shave seconds off most online searches by attempting to predict what users are looking for before they're done typing.
Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
The Mountain View search giant demonstrated Google Instant during a morning press conference at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, proclaiming that those seconds will add up to 350 million hours in time savings for its users over the next year.
"We're predicting what query you're likely to do," said Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience. "It means much faster search ... and really providing results in real time."
The product went live for U.S. users of the Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explore 8 browsers on Wednesday. For these consumers, a single keystroke now begins pulling up possible search results.
Type "w" in Google's familiar search box and results pop up for local weather at the top of the page. Add an "a" and the top link switches to Walmart.com. Tack on an "n" and, at least in San Francisco, it assumes you're looking for the Wanderlust yoga retreat in Squaw Valley.
Google is tapping into its massive database of online user behavior to predict the most common searches based on the letters, numbers or symbols entered. This allows the company to turbocharge the search process by attacking the critical choke point: The user.
On average, Web surfers spend nine seconds on a search query and another 15 seconds selecting a result, the company said. By contrast, it takes Google and the network operators together just over a second to funnel the query, and process and deliver results.
By anticipating what they're looking for, and allowing them to instantly click on or arrow down to the most relevant result, Google expects to save between 2 to 5 seconds per user per query.
"It really highlights the importance of search for Google," said David Hallerman, senior analyst for New York research firm eMarketer Inc. "It's where most of their revenue still comes from, so they're developing more capabilities to keep Google on top in terms of audience share and search share."
Google will begin rolling out the new feature internationally in the days to come, beginning with France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain and the U.K. It hopes to introduce a version for mobile devices this fall.
For now, the search engine will predict results based on aggregated user data, though down the road the process may become more personalized according to specific user behavior, Mayer said.
She declined to discuss specific revenue implications, but said that being a faster and more sophisticated search engine has historically allowed Google to grow both its market share and the total pie of online searches.
Asked if there's a potential to lose ad clicks, the company's bread and butter, by ushering users off its search page more quickly, she responded that there has been no indication of that in user tests so far.
This was a concern, however, for Benchmark Co. analyst Clayton Moran.
"I got the feeling it sort of encourages users to scroll down and potentially pay less attention to the right hand side ads," he said. "It's maybe something to watch."
On the other hand, he said Google Instant offers a better user experience that is likely to drive more volume, so it's difficult to predict the overall financial impact.
Another worry, raised several times during the question and answer session, is what impact the change will have on search engine optimization, or the methods that Web publishers employ to ensure high rankings on Google's search page.
Ben Gomes, distinguished engineer at Google, said the company hasn't changed anything about how it orders search results, but allowed that the new feature could shift consumer behavior over time in ways that might be difficult to predict.
Users "will start being presented with results immediately, so it's more and more important that your website be at the top," said Patrick Kerley, who oversees search engine optimization and other digital strategy efforts at Levick Strategic Communications in Washington, D.C. "There will be less time for a consumer to make a choice."
E-mail James Temple at jtemple@sfchronicle.com.
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About Google Instant
Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type.
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Google's attempt at predictive text leaves web users lost for words
Scribe is meant to make writing easier – but does the opposite
By Rhodri Marsden
Friday, 10 September 2010
Things of interest to risk managers
who take issue with any entity-producing premium range – no, I'm sorry. It's not working, I'll try again. Thinking of the right words isn't always easy, particularly if you're in a hurry, or drunk. But this week the internet giant Google has launched two services that aim to relieve some of the pressure on our overloaded brains, by using its position as the pre-eminent cataloguer of the world's data to suggest what we might be about to think next.
Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, at this week's launch of the Google Instant service. The new software was shown to the media by Marissa Mayer, the company's 'vice-president of search product and user experience'
Google Scribe, which I used to write the first line of this article, tries to complete our sentences via a pop-up menu of likely options, while Google Instant transforms the process of searching the web, with pages of results changing automatically as we type. As a result, the search giant can hand-hold us even more firmly through the process of typing, finding and, ultimately, spending money.
Scribe is one of many tools that has emerged from the research wing Google Labs (see box), and while it is interesting from a linguistics point of view, it is more of a diverting toy than a usable tool. As you type, you can choose (or not) from a numbered selection of words most likely to come next, based on the massive corpus of sentences that has been harvested from the web by Google.
Scribe's reliance on web text becomes clear when you start with "The" and use the first suggested option for each subsequent word. The experiment produces a phrase common on YouTube: "The following content has been identified by the YouTube community as being potentially offensive."
Using Scribe feels like a logical extension of predictive texting on mobile phones, and that is undoubtedly the platform where it will eventually prove its worth. But on a computer it does nothing to speed up typing; as one early user commented, it's as if someone is constantly interrupting you to try to finish your sentences, and always getting it wrong.
Speedy operation, by contrast, is the whole raison d'etre of Google Instant. The service was unleashed without warning on google.com and google.co.uk on Wednesday, causing surprise among users when results popped up a lot quicker than usual.
Back in 2000, the idea of predictive searching was outlandish enough for Google to launch "Mentalplex" as its April Fool gag, but 10 years later that joke has almost become a reality. It feels like the precocious niece of Google Suggest, the system that has triggered pop-up selections of likely search terms for more than five years – but those suggestions now extend to full pages of results. Google says this cuts up to five seconds from a 25-second average search time; not quite "search at the speed of thought", as was claimed at its launch, but certainly quick. The most startling change is that results appear even before you hit the "enter" key – an act we normally associate with ordering Google-bots to retrieve answers for us.
Unsurprisingly, as with any major changes to online services, tuts of irritation are already audible. Google's rise to dominance was largely predicated upon the simplicity of its interface, and any attempts to overcomplicate it tend to be resisted by purists.
But the most profound effect will be on the world of search engine optimisation (SEO) – the industry that advises businesses how to push themselves up Google's rankings. Yesterday, you could almost hear rule books being torn up as they were forced to reshape their approach. For example, typing "The" into google.com now brings up a page of results for Ricky Gervais's sitcom The Office, while the companies or trademarks that appear when a single letter is pressed on google.co.uk – from Argos, BBC and Currys to Xbox, YouTube and Zara – will have a battle on their hands to keep pole position. Google's fabled top-secret search algorithm, which largely dictates the shape and structure of web traffic, is key to the company's colossal social and commercial power. With about 70 per cent of searches made through Google, companies will be pursuing those top rankings with renewed vigour, while users will simply have to accept any irritating outcomes.
One small voice of dissent complained yesterday that Google Instant's results for the Russian economist, Eugen Slutsky, were now invisible because of prudish (but probably necessary) filters placed across the service.
Others aired more philosophical concerns about the impact of Scribe and Instant on the way we think. While Google Instant notionally makes things "easier", free thought is undoubtedly replaced by guidance based on that lowest common denominator of groupthink.
Innovations from the Google labs
City Tours
Another nail in the coffin of the guidebook, City Tours suggests walking tours in major cities starting at any specified address, incorporating as many attractions as possible in the given time frame.
Fast Flip
An instant, graphical overview of the world's news via an array of thumbnails of webpages; either view by news story, or by section or by publication
Aardvark
A previously independent service brought into the Google fold back in February, Aardvark gives personalised answers to questions – such as "what's the best restaurant in York?" in around five minutes, using a social media-style network of self-styled experts.
Google Image Swirl
The standard Google image search tool returns results according to supposed relevance to the query, but Image Swirl organises results according to visual similarity in a unique clickable interface.
Google Transliteration
Sadly not a means of instantly translating text, but a useful tool for speakers of Russian, Sanskrit, Urdu, Gujurati and many others to enter text phonetically in Roman script using an English keyboard, and see it displayed using their own character set.
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