Live Blogging The “Google Instant” Press Event & How To Watch Live, courtesy of Danny Sullivan and Search Engine Land.
One thing’s for certain. Out of the blue, Google’s quickly ramped this entire thing up to hype factor 10. Let’s see if it lives up to the mounting expectations. Engage!
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Now here’s Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience.
Google just passed 1 billion users per week. Funny, I was just asking them about this last week, if they had user numbers you know, since we keep hearing about Facebook’s users. I don’t think Google’s much expressed this. Now it has — boom, we have double Facebook. Not that they’re mentioning that.
Had 100s of improvements in search already. Caffeine, makes index 50% fresher. So they say, sometimes it’s amazing, sometimes, not so much,
Realtime results, to make real time content show up in search when the right context, to help users know what’s going on.
Making improvements to spell corrections, made it much easier to find them as part of auto-complete. You know, Google Suggest.
Rolled out enhancements to questions and answers. Two years ago, they rolled out Google Squared (um, I think that was last year?). Today, enter questions and get answers at the top, like the inventor of the telephone.
Starts in search, a way to bookmark URLs, Which was really a pullback from the SearchWiki product that took criticism and Google finally shutdown, though she’s not mentioning that.
There was also the redesign of Google this year to three columns.
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A Fundamental Shift to search. That’s the slide up now, and she saying this is something we’re about to hear.
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Google Instant, pulls answers as you type.
She’s demoing on how after just typing letters sfm, she’s got the answer she wanted. “It’s just that fast and that interactive.” results stream to you based on prediction of what you’ve typed so far.
Now showing how you can scroll with arrow keys through suggestions and get the results to change.
“A lot of people think Google Instant is search as you type. But it’s actually search before you type.” Actually predict what you’re likely to type and bring the results in real time.
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Google Instant will be available on Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE8 on Google in US later today and then to several other countries in coming days. But you have to be signed in to see it.
Which is sending up my alarms, because is this also just part of monitoring more?
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