Google Instant – Trying to Destroy the Experience of Simplicity
Far be it from me to say Google shouldn't try new things. I wish they'd try not messing with Verizon on the net neutrality, or maybe just not being so overt about the complete and total lack of privacy from it's upper management, but today they released, in a very haphazard way, Google Instant, and I hate it.
OK, in my book there were a few reasons that people switched from Yahoo! to Google in the early days - one was certainly the search results, but in the beginning they weren't that much better - it still had a lot to do with the terms you asked for, and the best "search engines" were browsers that would hit a dozen search engines for you and bring it all together.
The other big driver - and certainly this was a biggie for me, was the simplicity and speed of the Google homepage. You typed into a box, hit enter, and got answers. You didn't have to wait for Yahoo!'s "portal" to load - measured in seconds, and you didn't have the distractions of the entire page. Simplicity was the rule of the day, and it was wonderful.
This morning Google has been rolling out, in fits and starts, their new offering - Google Instant. Now when you type, it immediately jumps to the answers and updates them as you type. While this may seem like a real time saver, to me it's at least a distraction, and at most, a horrible time waster.
If I need to type in a series of key words, or maybe my search criteria is more than 15 characters. The fact that it starts "searching" for me after four or five is a waste until I get to 15. I'm not done, I'm not liable to stop, and I wanted to get the search string in there. They already do "predictive searching" on the search string, which is nice to a point, because if there's a hit there, I can save myself the time, but there's no way showing me the entire search results is a time-saver. Not a chance.
I was worried that it was ON, and there was nothing I could do about it. But after a few hours, it became clear that it's something that I could turn off. I did so immediately and without a single reservation.
Guys... first, make your rollouts a little smoother - No, make that a lot smoother. There's no need for this to take an entire morning and have so many people wondering what's going on with no way of stopping it.
Next, make sure it's clear how to turn the crud off. You should have learned from Wave, and the full graphic homepage, but I guess that wasn't enough. Here... take the lesson... make it obvious how to disable the new crap. Lots of folks just want what you're good at.
I'm still shaking my head...