If this is what search has come to, measuring result returns in milliseconds, I think we have officially left the golden age of Web search behind.
Yesterday, Google added a nice bundle of new features to mobile and desktop-based search. Search by Image is fairly innovative—who wouldn't want to drop an image onto a Google search page and instantly get some information back about what it is? Instant Page, on the other hand, is a bit underwhelming.
Here's how it works, Google uses its anonymized relevance engine—you do not have to be logged into a Google account to use it—to guess which search results you'll click on and pre-render (more complete than pre-fetch) the page. As demonstrated by Google, this act shaved less than half a second off your page-load times. The difference was so small, I could barely see it: The page without Instant Page filled in a couple of the larger images a bit slower. On Instant page, the whole page simply popped into existence.
I do not see this as changing my life, but Google execs insist that this stuff all adds up. Instant results, which are now fairly ubiquitous across Google's services, start showing you results as you type. This means that you don't have to type, hit enter, and then wait a millisecond for the proper results to appear. On the other hand, Instant Search also shows you results for typos with blinding speed. In image search, I imagine I might, if my image filter settings aren't high enough—and even if they are—see some images that I simply cannot unsee. I don't see how that improves my search life.
Instant page obviously takes this all to a whole new level, and when you combine Instant Results and Instant Page, you save, perhaps, an entire second. Google execs said that this does have an impact. "We do tremendous experimentation with speed. We have found even shaving 50 milliseconds from search process, users search more and more," said one.
Okay, so people search more when search gets faster, which does not mean they are necessarily saving time. They're simply spending more time doing exactly what Google wants them to do, which is search. Remember, Google makes money when you see contextual ads surrounding Google search results. I'm not discounting all the milliseconds I'm collecting to do other things in my life, but based on what Google's saying, I really don't get that time back.
Not every Google innovation is about time. Searching by image is probably one of the most useful desktop search enhancements I've seen in a while. If you've ever used Google Goggles, Google Search by Image is not much different. Instead of taking a photo, you can drag and drop photos from your desktop or even upload images, though why I'd want to, essentially, give my photos to Google is beyond me. They're not doing anything with them, but it just seems like an odd thing to do. Google's engine looks at the image and instant tells you whatever it can about it—which is a lot.
The moment Google talks about conducting search via image, however, everyone gets a little tense. How are they looking at the images? If it's an image of 10 people, will they identify all those people and then connect the Instant Results to a dozen or more links about all those people, and pre-render via Google Instant Page five of the people pages I'm most likely to click on? Nope. Google apparently is not using the facial-recognition tools we know it has (use Google's Picasa and you can see them in action) or even trying to connect this to its Google Profile and +1 social services. The only way it can identify images is via pixel, shape, colors, and image characteristic matching. It doesn't see the people. One Google exec did say that it could match a picture of a group of people with the exact same picture of those people, but that would not be done based on who they are, simply how the picture looks.
I tried to imagine how I might use Google Search by Image in real life. Do I have any images on my own system I can't identify? Maybe it'll come in handy when, say, I have a large, archival photo and there are certain objects within the image that I cannot identify. Google could use the power of its pixel and pattern and color matching to tell me what it is. That's neat. Of course, this kind of activity doesn't save me time, either. In fact, I now envision myself wasting loads of time with Google's new Search by Image. Perhaps I can gain it back, in tiny millisecond increments, with Google Instant Page. We'll see.
0 comments:
Post a Comment