Google Instant: the technology anti-climax of the decade

Is Google Instant really the best that the company's brains can come up with, wonders Milo Yiannopoulos.

Google even designed a special 'doodle' to celebrate the arrival of Instant. 

For almost a decade, search was the pre-eminent content discovery mechanism . If you 

wanted to find something, you stuck a phrase in a search box, hit the 

button and hoped for the best. And for a long time, that worked just fine: Google 

refined their groundbreaking algorithm so it eventually seemed to know exactly what 

you were looking for.

I say seemed, because the reality is that most of us learned subconsciously what we 

needed to put into the box to get the results we wanted. In other words, we were doing 

a lot of the software's work for it, and much of the magic was illusory. But there's no 

denying that Google's original innovation in search transformed the way the internet 

worked and made the business of finding stuff much faster and much easier. It also 

created an enormous market - one Google still dominates - that allowed companies to 

sell us things based on what we had typed in that box. And all was well, for a time.

But then something happened. Social networking, social media, whatever you want to call it... suddenly, content was coming right at us, without us even asking for it. We couldn't escape it. A few hyperactive egotists in each community began curating content and spewing it out to their friends. People were sharing photos, stories and links and we found that we were spending less and less time foraging around for things and more and more time sitting back and letting it wash over us.

Fast forward to 2010, and we're being assaulted by more stuff than we can possibly consume. Facebook, Twitter and email are shovelling pictures and video down our throats ever more quickly. Feedback loops enabled by sharing and retweeting functions mean that each of us has now turned into an over-sharer as well as an over-consumer. Attempts to make this consumption more manageable, like British start-up curated.by, are still in their infancy, and the amount of time we spend on search engines is dwindling as we get sucked into a cluster of networks that saturate us with things we never asked for but which we nonetheless can't get enough of. Those clusters of networks increasingly do not include search.

So you might imagine that a business whose revenue rests on search - between 95 and 99 per cent of it, depending on whose figures you believe - might have started to take notice by now. You might imagine they'd have had a serious crack at grabbing a slice of that pie. You might imagine they'd attempt to leverage their global dominance and vast data repository to create something utterly compelling. To create a whole new market all over again.

But, apparently, you'd be wrong. Because Google is yet to launch a single properly successful social product. Buzz was a bust. Wave was a bust. The rumoured upcoming social network, I have no hesitation in predicting, will be a bust. I don't think that's because Google is incapable of launching new platforms, like Jeff Jarvis does. I think it's because they genuinely don't get, and don't care about, social software as a means of discovery. And if we accept that premise for a moment - that Google wants to concentrate its energies on the search business, and pretend that social stuff isn't happening - the question immediately becomes: what next for search? What incredible innovation is Google, a company that changed the face of the online world, going to come up with next?

Google's hotly anticipated event yesterday looked like it was going to offer an answer to that question. A smorgasbord of Google top brass, including Vice President of Search Product and User Experience Marissa Mayer and a number of star engineers graced a swanky press conference in San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art to reveal...

Autocomplete for search results. No, really.

Is it just me, or was that the most spectacularly anti-climactic announcement in the technology industry for a decade? Can we just take a step back for a second? Google is faced on all sides with explosive growth from networks and platforms that aren't even indexable, let alone visible to Google for the purposes of ad sales, and it unveils a slightly faster way to get your search results? What am I missing here?

"Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly," said the boffins from Mountain View in their blog post announcing Google Instant.

So, after years of research, in response to the question, "What next for Google?," that's what all those billions of dollars and brain cells have come up with. Wow.

envira blog