Google Instant is the name for the immediate results you get when you start typing something to search. By the time you get to the "A" as in C-h-a ... " the search results for the seemingly ubiquitous Mr. Sheen appear on your screen. Johanna Wright ('05) is Google's product manager on the team that brought us Instant and recently Fast Company interviewed her as it cited Instant's innovation in naming the company Number Six on its list of "The World's Most Innovative Companies."
Wright told Fast Company how Google improves its search experience:
- "We make about 100 quality upgrades to the search engine each quarter, and we're running between 50 and 200 experiments at any one time. So many of the things I'm most proud of are the hidden quality changes that no one can see.
- "The idea of search as you type has been around Google for a long time, but the magical innovation moment came when one of our engineers realized that we should tie searching as you type to autocomplete. All of a sudden, you could see how this would be a compelling product.
- "The perfect search engine needs to be intelligent, personal, and interactive. The more we understand what you want, the more we can anticipate. But there's still a lot of room for us to grow and so much more we can do.
Fast Company Interviews Johanna Wright
Fast Company's List of the World's Most Innovative Companies
(photo courtesy Google)
Comments