An unofficial blog that watches Google's attempts to move your operating system online since 2005. Not affiliated with Google.

Send your tips to gostips@gmail.com.

December 5, 2009

When Google Is Slow...

Google usually displays the search results in less than a second. so you rarely have to wait to see the results. Translated search, the most recent feature added to the search options sidebar, is a rare example of slow Google feature. It's also one of the most powerful features ever released by Google because it transforms Google into a multilingual search engine.

Unfortunately, the results for Google Translated Search are generated in more than a second and sometimes you have to wait 5 seconds to get the results.



It's strange to see Google releasing a slow feature on the main site. O'Reilly Radar shared some interesting results from Google's experiments:

"One experiment increased the number of search results per page from 10 to 30, with a corresponding increase in page load times from 400 milliseconds to 900 milliseconds. This resulted in a 25% drop-off in first result page searches. Adding the checkout icon (a shopping cart) to search results made the page 2% slower with a corresponding 2% drop in searches/user."

4 comments:

  1. How hard would it be for Google to initially show just the first 200 or so results, then load the 20,000,000+ more as the user is browsing through the first results? It seems like this could really speed up the user's experience, but I doubt that Google hasn't thought of it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm currently using 64% of my gmail quota and search on gmail is starting to get noticeably slow - about 5 secs on average. Of course it still beats outlook search by several days (-: but not what I've come to expect from G

    ReplyDelete
  3. i like the idea of pre-loading the results... but i wouldn't desire that many results to be loaded and the server usage would be generally unnecessary as i am sure that many studies will point to the fact that users rarely go beyond the first few hundred results. but it would be a great feature to turn on and off for power users who are interested in such capabilities.

    when will Google ever stop their amazing advancements... i hope never.

    Google for life!

    ReplyDelete
  4. I've seen something like this before, but I cannot recall where. But, it worked a bit like this; after searching the initial page was loaded with the default amount of searches, and as you scrolled down it constantly added more and more results. The page kept growing as you scrolled.

    Anybody know where I've seen this before??? I could have sworn it was with Google.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.