Did they invent the bugs, too?

Funny thing happened to my browser recently (FF, Ubuntu). I could only get 10 entries listed for a search - I have explicitly set it to give me 50 at a time.

Open up settings and, yes, the search settings had been reset back to the default of 10. Fixed that, saved my settings, went back to search - still only getting 10 entries. Switched off "instant" which had appeared unannounced next to the search button, went back to my settings (which had also reset itself back to 10 entries). Set that back, again, to 50, saved it (again) and this time it stuck.

As a test, I switched instant back on - whammo, only 10 entries returned and my setting of 50 had been set back to the default.

So Google, maybe when this facility is out of beta, and working properly, I'll give it another try. But until that time: instant search? nein danke.

It's instant AdWords, not instance Search

How often do adwords get displayed while you're typing your "instant search?" Kodo's to the chocolate factory for marrying those ideas. Unless there is some major backlash surrounding usability, I don't see it going away.

Marketting...

Their back-end server has changed, but average user wouldn't notice, unless you change the front-end.

So, does that mean it's 5 years until Google is irrelevant

or that Yahoo! has taken 5 years to deduce its own irrelevancy?

Yahoo possibly newcomers on the block...

I seem to remember a product from Autonomy that would provide search results from information on your local machine as you typed text in document. This could also be extended to the web. The search recommendations were supposed to be conext sensitive so could review your text on the page to tell whether the results were about penguins in the Antarctic or penguins of the LINUX kind.

The product was available at least 6 to 7 years ago.

Yahoo - Coulda Shoulda Woulda

Over its long history Yahoo has managed to invent/buy in pretty much every great web idea before anybody else, and then managed to shut down/lose/ignore every single one of them. More than a decade ago, back in the late-1990s, it had user accounts/personas, photos, IM, email, profiles, online notebooks/storage, geocities, streaming, music, etc. It could have done Web 2.0/Facebook weborrhea half a decade before everyone else. Instead it just pissed it away through neglect and active mismanagement, deleting user profiles semi-capriciously, changing, renaming or neutering services. It's basically been crap since about Year 3 of its existence - I think its corporate DNA was fundamentally crap from the getgo. The only reason it has totered along for so long is that it happened to be in there so early, it had a huge pile of cash, and most banner ad buyers are lethargic.

Implementations

I'm all for giving credit for interfaces where due. While validation for Yahoo's past work may be deserved (I qualify because I don't know and don't pretend to know who did exactly what), I think Google's timing is more about the backend and it was more important that the implementation minimized the tradeoff between currency and interface dynamism.

Not new when Yahoo "invented" it either

Bah. Bradley Rhodes' Remembrance Agent did this back in '96; and in a more useful fashion, if you're an Emacs user.

It was also an order of magnitude or so less annoying than Google Instant Headache.