Yesterday we introduced Google Instant, a change to make search fast and interactive by showing you results instantly as you type. With Instant we’ve turned search from a static HTML page into an AJAX application, just as we did with Google Maps and Gmail. You can learn more about Google Instant in yesterday’s blog post, but we also wanted to share a peek behind the scenes into some of the engineering challenges we faced in design and infrastructure.
The design challenge: relevant, not distracting
Our key design challenge was to make sure people would notice relevant results without being distracted. We knew it would take extensive testing to find the right design, so we ran through a sequence of prototypes, usability studies (testing with people from the community), dogfooding (testing with Google employees) and search experiments (testing with a small percentage of Google users). Some of our early prototypes weren’t perfect. For example, we tried a prototype where we waited for someone to stop typing before showing results, which did not work. We realized the experience needed to be fast to work well. We also considered other interfaces which essentially clustered results for a variety of queries based on probability.
The engineering team at work
As Google Instant neared completion, we packed the core teams into two large rooms on our main campus. We began having daily stand stand-up meetings (more than 50 people). With all that hard work behind us, we’re thrilled to see Google Instant out in the wild! But, in some ways, this is just the beginning of a new kind of “conversational” search interaction. We will continue to experiment, as we always have—and with the help of your feedback, we hope to make Instant even better over time! While it’s a big change, I personally believe that we’ll look back and wonder how search was ever any other way.
Source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-instant-behind-scenes.html
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