A funny thing happened on the way to my Google search…

By Sandra Clitter  

Google is an everyday part of my life, as I’m sure that it is for many of you. I use iGoogle for my Home Page (that’s a personalized start-up page on Google, tailored to my specific wants and desires). Its not often that I use ‘classic’ Google. Sometimes I miss some fantastic Google Doodles because my iGoogle page uses the standard Google logo, and doesn’t substitute the Google Doodles.

For some reason, I used the ‘classic’ Google page the other day and was mesmerized by a Google Doodle that was a bunch of bouncing balls. Every time that I moused over the Google logo, the logo disbursed into a bunch of bouncing balls, then as I moused away, they settled back down into the logo. I actually commented on it during the day to a client or colleague…how incredible to have such a recognizable logo that you can afford to ‘mess it up’ on a regular basis. In fact, people COMPETE to mess it up. Now, THAT is brand awareness.

(forgive me, I digress on the way to my ‘real’ point today)

Today I happened upon ‘Google Instant’ which some of you may have noticed if you searched for something using Google yesterday or today…but only if you use the classic home page…not the iGoogle home page. Again, I was ‘out’ of my iGoogle page and on the classic Google home page. A funny thing happened as I started my search…the results appeared directly below what I was typing…I didn’t even have to hit ‘enter’. What’s going on here? Switch back to iGoogle…same old behavior…type the search string, hit enter, get results. Go to the classic Google home page a www.google.com and the behavior is different. What’s up with that?

Of course, I had to search ‘Google Instant’ to find out what was going on. In a nutshell, Google decided that their searches were taking too long (really!?), so in classic Google they have started showing the results underneath the search box as you type. This allows you to scan the results at the same time that you are typing, allowing you to more quickly locate the information you were searching. Google claims that it can save me 2-5 seconds per search (I really didn’t realize that I was wasting so much time!). More astonishing…Google estimates that it will save 3.5 BILLION seconds searching every day – that’s a productivity improvement globally of over 950,000 hours/day! Guess we’ve really been slackers, haven’t we?!


11 Comments

  1. Vesley
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  2. Bradly Balser
    Posted March 18, 2011 at 10:59 pm | Permalink | Reply

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  6. Woester
    Posted February 21, 2011 at 4:50 pm | Permalink | Reply

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