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posted by martyb on Friday July 28 2017, @06:35AM   Printer-friendly
from the not-mourned? dept.

Martin Brinkmann at gHacks reports

When Google launched Google Instant Search back in 2010, the company called it a fundamental shift in search that would save searchers time when running searches on Google.

Instant Search displayed search results page to the user during the process of typing the actual search phrase the user was interested in.

In [the] best case, it would display the desired results earlier. In [the] worst case, it would throw a number of unrelated search results page at you while you tried to focus on typing your search query.

[...] I disabled Instant Search as soon as it came out. [It] was terribly annoying if you typed long queries quickly.

The feature could also jack up bandwidth [usage,] as more results pages may have had to be loaded during your typing of the search phrase you were interested in.

Starting [July 27], Google Instant Search is no more. The company has put the feature to rest, all thanks to the rise of mobile and the fact that Instant Search does not really work that well on mobile devices for a number of reasons.

Do any Soylentils still do searches from Google's landing page?
Once you get a Google result, have you then been typing into Google's page to refine your search?
I hated Mozilla's AwesomeBar and, when I encountered Instant Search (on the library's machine), I was irritated. (I do searches as URLs, from the Address Bar; it's one reason that I hate most Google "replacements", which are script-driven and don't show you a URL that you can repost.)


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday July 28 2017, @09:24AM (1 child)

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday July 28 2017, @09:24AM (#545686) Journal

    I'm glad it's gone. It was presumptuous and irritating. I think it also on a larger level furthers a discursive reductionism whereby everybody is or ought to be thinking the same thoughts in the same keywords at the same time. Umm, no, Google, I do not communicate in Justin Bieber promulgated sound bites and I don't appreciate your pre-supposing that's what I'm searching for.

    I have generally given Google much more of the benefit of the doubt because they have brought so much more positive things to the world than, say, Microsoft, but they have rather overstepped themselves in the past decade and really ought to spend some quality time re-connecting with their original ethos of "Don't be evil."

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  • (Score: 2, Touché) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday July 29 2017, @12:06AM

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Saturday July 29 2017, @12:06AM (#546044) Homepage

    You're giving them too much credit. They love to steer people as best they can, and boy is it well-known what their agenda is. Read the following timeline to see why Google really gave it up:

    1. Google based their instant search on everybody else's searches. This lead to the infamous Michelle Obama Monkey [cnn.com] controversy.
    2. Google removed that one case but refused to give a shit about other cases, merely providing the disclaimer blaming the people of the world rather than their search algorithms.
    3. Years later, it became more publicly known that the top displayed results for "Jews are..." and "Blacks are..." were very unflattering to the groups in question, so they tweeked the algorithms to hide the negative results.
    4. Shortly after that, people discovered that the displayed results for "Jews are very..." and "Blacks are very..." yielded unflattering results.
    5. After further tweaking, the displayed results shown for "Jews are..." and "Blacks are..." nothing. Not even anything positive.
    6. They use the nomination of Hillary Clinton as an excuse to remove all negative search suggestions "about anybody (note: Except Donald Trump), because we're not mean," but it was obvious why.
    7. Meanwhile, complicated searches involving Jews, Blacks, and Hillary Clinton still provided overwhelmingly negative suggestions.
    8. Google decides that people who use Google search are too mean, kills the autosuggest feature altogether.
    9. Typing "Ooga Booga Looga" into Google Translate still auto-translates to Somalian.