I’m a heavy Google user. I probably access the Google basic search page four dozen times a day. I have never missed a Google Doodle (love those!) and Google is my go-to search engine for most things. When Google Instant Search was announced, I thought, well, that’s cool, maybe I’ll like that.
Now that it’s been a couple of weeks, I’m wondering what the big deal is. Yes, I can usually get displayed search results before I’ve actually typed in the whole search term, but then I still have to take my hands off the keyboard, grab the mouse, and scroll down to choose what I want to look at. If Google wanted to make this cool, they’d make it instantly scrollable with my arrow keys, without having to stop and reposition my cursor with a mouse, or hit the tab key twice to get into the page for scrolling. By habit, I have used the down-arrow-select-hit-enter move in the search box since Google made that available (what a timesaver!). But let’s take that one step better and let me use that down-arrow-select thing even more seamlessly, jumping me onto the first search result and then letting me continue to down-arrow through the links until I get the one I want and can hit enter.
Or maybe this should become a function of the browser, of all browsers. I love hot keys and doing things on the keyboard so I don’t have to move my hand to the mouse excessively. Having had both shoulder and hand surgery in the last two years, the less arm movement, the better. Maybe there’s already a plug-in to do this (I use Firefox) but I just haven’t found it yet.
As for the instant search, I guess it’s nifty, but all that flashing/changing text is kind of distracting, especially since I can’t really use it “instantly” the way I’d like to.
What are your thoughts?
The problem I have with the instant search, and why I turned it off, is that showing results for partial keywords as one types them is semantically ‘insane’ and a horrible distraction. If it would only refresh results after each distinct keyword entered, at each space character, it could be useful, as a sort if incremental faceted like search… Keep entering twrms until you start to see useful results.
But assuming that a partially typed keyword is semantically valid and should be searched on is really stupid and Google should be ashamed for such nonsense.