The Business Of Search

Your Brain And Google Instant

Quentin Hardy, 09.14.10, 12:00 PM EDT

The aim behind Google's new Instant search is to get you to search more.

Quentin Hardy

Last Wednesday Googleannounced Instant search, an impressive technical achievement that shows probable search results in real time--as you type letters into the search box. According to Google, this will save between two and five seconds per query. Given the 1 billion users on Google each week, this works out to about 11 hours saved cumulatively per second.

If you're thinking about where to squander your share, forget it.Google ( GOOG - news - people ) already knows. You're going to spend it doing more searches.

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Speedy results feel like success, says Udi Manber, vice president of engineering at Google. "People search more because they get more interested in a subject."

From nearly the start, Google has prided itself on speed, using valuable pixels on its search results page to tell you how long its computers needed to answer your query. Typically it's about three-tenths of a second, far less than the nine seconds Google figures you need to type in a query, or the 15 seconds you spend selecting a suggested answer from the 10 links displayed on a results page.

That was not bragging rights at all, however. Manber and others at Google have tested our experiences of search, and found that nearly imperceptible improvements in speed affect the way we feel not just about the service, but also about the quality of the results. "A few hundredths of a second can be tremendously important," he says. If it feels good, you do it more. In the end, you're where Google wants you, because it was so fast at telling you how to go somewhere else.

To prove the theory about microspeeds in search, Google has also deliberately slowed its service. This was one of several experiments the company is always running live to some portion of its users. In this case, however, the results had an effect on Google itself.

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Instant resulta are just annoying. How do I turn it off?

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"We slowed down search by a subliminal amount, a couple of extra milliseconds, to get your results," says Johanna Wright, director of product management. When Google did, people did not search as often. "Eventually we stopped; we decided slowing it down was evil."

Conversely, Google also sped up the presentation speed of its Maps products in another experiment, sacrificing quality of graphics for speed. According to Wright, people in that experiment searched 50% more. "Task times are going to shrink," she predicted. "You'll get one search, but you'll fiddle with it, look more at related suggestions." Which also, of course, raises the chance Google can serve up an ad you'll like enough to click. Win-win, except for that "time saving" part.

Other amusements with Instant search include figuring out what you can get with just one letter--a kind of zeitgeist of the most popular stuff in search (except for porn and other deviance, which Google has banned.) In its demos, Google featured the way that "w" instantly brings up the weather. Almost all other letters, however, just bring up the names of companies and products, a kind of comment on a consumer society.

It gets interesting again if you try different numbers or characters, or add spaces after typing one thing. The letter "h" with two blank spaces, for example, brings up "Plank's Constant 6.626068 × 10-34 m2 kg / s," which as you'll recall is used in describing subatomic quanta. So far that page still doesn't have an ad, if you don't count the sponsored pitch to keep trying Google Instant. Which, as they like to remind you, saves time.