Live From Google’s Search Event: The Importance Of Fast

Wednesday, 08 September 2010 18:46

Live From Google’s Search Event: The Importance Of Fast

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Over the last 24 hours there’s been a significant buildup to a special Google event that’s being held this morning at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art. The search giant is clearly excited: Google featured a kinetic logo on its homepage yesterday, and they now have a logo that

went live last night hints at live updating search. The event is about to kick off, and it’s sure to bring some big news. We’ll be live blogging it below and will also be writing individual posts calling out the biggest news. You can watch a live stream of the event here.

Periodically we do ‘State of the Unions’

“What we do at Google is one part art, one part science.” “Today we’re going to talk about the importance of fast”.

Marissa Mayer has taken the stage. “Obviously we have a really big announcement, but first…”

-In past few months have passed over 1 billion users on Google each week.
-In 2010 have rolled out more than 500 changes to ranking and UI.

-Google Caffeine, square, stars, other major changes rolling out.

Yesterday’s doodle was meant to tease today’s announcement.

“We see today as a fundamental shift”.

Now talking about Woman with a Hat, a piece featured at MOMA. If you were to look for information in the 30′s, you’d spend half a day looking up information. In the 50′s you might be able to call a librarian, you could get the information in around half an hour. 1995, you had CD-ROM encyclopedia, you could find this information in a matter of minutes. But it was static information.

It takes a user on average around nine seconds to enter a search query into Google. Serving results takes around 300 ms from Google, plus 800 ms total in Network time. Takes around 15 seconds to select a result. A search takes 25 seconds.

At Google we think we have a faster way. Google Instant. And that’s what we’re launching today. Gets search results as you type so search is interactive the whole time you’re typing. Google Instant looks like normal Google search. But as you start typing, you see results — you don’t have to hit enter. You can hit ‘tab’ to complete a word.

You can use up and down arrows to jump between queries. “A lot of people think that Google Instant is search as you type. But it’s actually search before you type.” Instead of searching for exactly what you entered, it searches for the auto-completed suggestion. So you can see results when you’re only a few characters into your search.