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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: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Friday July 28 2017, @12:46PM (3 children)

    by TheRaven (270) on Friday July 28 2017, @12:46PM (#545734) Journal
    The thing that made me switch to DDG was Google hijacking the up and down arrow buttons in the search box. In every other text field in my system, up and down arrows jump to the start and end, in Google's one they scrolled up and down. DDG introduced the same UI bug a few months later, but I emailed them and they fixed it the same day.
    --
    sudo mod me up
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Interesting=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3  
  • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Friday July 28 2017, @03:10PM (2 children)

    by Pino P (4721) on Friday July 28 2017, @03:10PM (#545783) Journal

    In every other text field in my system, up and down arrows jump to the start and end, in Google's one they scrolled up and down.

    Which operating system? Combo boxes on Windows [microsoft.com], such as the search field in Notepad++'s Find (Ctrl+F) command, bind up and down to choosing an item from a list. And in Command Prompt on Windows and Bash on GNU/Linux, Up and Down scroll through my command history. Home and End still jump to the start and end of the input field. How is scrolling through your Google search history conceptually different from these?

    • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday July 29 2017, @07:54AM (1 child)

      by TheRaven (270) on Saturday July 29 2017, @07:54AM (#546182) Journal
      Mac OS X. Unlike every other OS I've used, they go out of their way to ensure that a lot of common UI components behave in exactly the same way in all applications, which is usually good but makes inconsistency more jarring (and makes Qt apps almost totally unusable, because they look almost like native ones but behave subtly differently in a lot of small ways). Combo boxes do make the up and down arrows but only after you've pressed the down arrow key to expand the combo box. Until that point, you can use up-arrow to skip back to the beginning of the line, which is something I often want to do in a search field, to edit the first word. Google automatically expanded the drop-down, breaking this. DDG handles it correctly: up arrow takes me to the start of the line if I'm editing text, down arrow drops moves me into the first element of the suggestions and then allows up and down arrows to navigate within them.
      --
      sudo mod me up
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @10:42PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @10:42PM (#546455)

        OS X is horrible about that. Maybe things were better back in the MacOS days, but now it seems every application has to be different, with a different look and feel and UI. A lot of Apple's own applications are pretty big offenders. Things like the Home and End keys (does Apple even put those on their computers anymore?) will do different things, including nothing at all, and the only way to know is to try it and find out what happens. In comparison Windows is actually pretty consistent (though not nearly as much as before), though some shitty software such as iTunes still likes to do its own thing.