Personally I know this is going to save me hours or even days. If one is studying and searching for references, articles and so on, you go through a lot of searches until you find the right thing. You could argue that what Google does is finally provide intelligent help to an intelligent searcher.
For example, my current research is focusing heavily on Everett Rogers, the author of 'Diffusion of Innovations'. What I was unaware of until the search shown below is that he also has his own 'Change Theory'!
As Matt Cutts, from Google, said in his blog:
As the Google Instant page mentions, “If everyone uses Google Instant globally, we estimate this will save more than 3.5 billion seconds a day. That’s 11 hours saved every second.” With over a billion searches a day and over a billion users searching each week, that adds up to 350 million hours of user time saved a year. That’s 500+ human lifespans saved a year by this feature if everyone used it.
But for the average punter who might just need to search for the local cinema or garden widgets it must also help, right?
But user behaviour, as usual, can still make a difference. Gina Trapani explains in her blog how to use tabs and keyboard arrows to navigate the search box more efficiently.
As a touch-typist, typing my search queries is my preferred user-interface. But what of speech? How will they integrate this functionality into the voice commands? Will they be able to?
This tool should also help SEO for those little people who can't afford to use an agency. It is a sobering thought that this very blog doesn't appear in any of the results for SealTree:
Maybe something I should work at...or maybe I'll just carry on playing with Google to see what searches I wasn't thinking of...
...hey...is Google reading my mind? If so, I never knew I knew so much!
Great article - thanks Ronan. Playing around with Google Search, have you tried Google Wonder Wheel? You need to turn off Instant search, type your key word and then select Wonder Wheel under search tools on the left. Here's an example - http://www.google.com/search?q=wheel&hl=en&prmd=i&source=lnt&tbs=ww:1&sa=X&ei=C5WLTKuvIYG0lQfe491g&ved=0CBQQpwU&tbo=1.
ReplyDeleteUseful when you're searching for related themes.
Thank you Matt...I also like playing with the timeline search:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&tbo=1&tbs=tl:1&q=%22Do+some+work%22&aq=f&aqi=g1&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=
Perhaps not immediately useful, but one can spend hours wading through the ephemera of the interweb with it...
...although perhaps best to actually do some work...
...now I wonder what happens if I Google "Do some work" in the timeline?