Google Seeking "Search Without Search" 198
An anonymous reader writes "Forget Google Instant, the search giant is working on ways to push relevant info to users before they have even asked for it...
Foursquare-style location 'check-ins' are also apparently on the way next year."
What's your style? (Score:4, Interesting)
"I guess you could call it the art of fighting without fighting." -Bruce Lee
I feel like Iv already seen this (Score:3, Interesting)
geo --crap (Score:4, Interesting)
As someone who travels from location to location in between different countries, I am sick of this whole "geo" nonsense, and location based services. For example, remember the good old days when you could go to _somewhere.com_ and get that specific service or site in the language you prefer? Nowadays you get whatever X based on your location or better yet on some computer systems based it is based on the locality of the box. More times than most it is hard to get the information you want and can _understand_ especially when you cannot even understand where _what it is you were looking for_ is.
Also TFA:
"The idea is to push information to people."
Also why do all these business and services feel the need to "push" their information or services upon people ? The more they do this the more people start feeling drowned . From reading the article this geo google VP sounds a little out of touch. Would rather "push" everything on everyone the way google sees best.
Re:42 (Score:2, Interesting)
Just put it on the front page and be done with it.
Hitchhiker's Guide was great but no, please don't do that. Please don't modify Google's front page any further. Has anybody else used another person's computer and been shocked at how annoying and needlessly flashy Google Instant is, and been happy to return to your own NoScript-running browser? Oh yeah and as a bonus if you don't run Google's JS you get the actual URLs of the search results and not some redirection server that helps to track you.
The way they're trying to make Google Instant nice and politically correct, free of piracy or hacking terms that might "offend" someone reveals more than anything the kind of marketing mentality behind this stuff. All I want a search engine to do is accept my input of keywords, wait for me to press Enter, and then fetch the search results for what I typed. Just those three things. Any other features are bloat. I sure as hell don't want it guessing about what I want to search for when it's so easy to explicitly tell it that. The effort I make to not be tracked by anyone including Google would make such guesses unlikely to be correct anyway.
I think the problem here is that Google has produced such a fine basic search engine that has already become the dominant choice. Now they don't know when to quit and will keep trying to "improve" it even if these changes aren't improvements at all. Can't be perceived as stagnant and all of that, or so the marketers seem to think.
I mean damn, just think of the message behind Google Instant for a moment. "You typed three letters. 17,549,221 users who typed those three letters got these results. We'll just feel free to assume you couldn't want anything that they didn't want, see we got it all here in our statistics. After all, you are an individual, just like everybody else. You are fungible to us. And of course we'll save you the staggering, horrible, strenuous effort of pressing the Enter key because we are so helpful." Anyone else see it?
Re:42 (Score:4, Interesting)
Has anybody else used another person's computer and been shocked at how annoying and needlessly flashy Google Instant is
User interface was what made me ditch AltaVista for Google. User interface was one of the main reasons I stopped using Google. It started with the autocomplete thing - every other text field in any program on my system lets me use the up and down arrow keys to jump to the beginning and end of the input field (there are other ways of doing this, but they require a modifier key, so up and down arrow are the ones I use). Google decided to break this, so I kept finding myself in the completion list, rather than where I expected to be. Then they modified the search results page to the current abomination and I gave up on them completely.
JWZ wrote that the decline of Netscape started when they stopped hiring people who were there because they wanted to change the world, and started hiring people who were there because it was a great place to work. The last couple of times I've visited Google, I've asked people why they were there - almost all of them told me that it was because it was a great place to work.
Re:42 (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know why people complain about the search page - you spend NO TIME THERE.
It is the result page that matters. And the result page at Yahoo! and live.com is completely full of graphic ads and other garbage.
The only results page as clean as Googles is Ask.com - too bad their results are horrible.