Since February, Google has been quietly testing a new type of search functionality: AJAX search. Basically, Google uses more advanced JavaScript to make search result pages load even faster by only loading new information as needed on new queries. And while it doesn’t appear to be rolling out on a large scale yet, more users are starting to notice it.
One such user is Mike Stoppelman, a software engineer at Yelp. But Stoppelman’s take on it is interesting, and worth noting because before he worked at Yelp, he was an engineer at Google for four years. As Stoppelman sees it, Google is bringing out AJAX Search to combat Microsoft’s Bing search product, which has garnered quite a bit of attention since its launch a few months ago. Some claim that Bing is faster than Google, but an AJAX Google would undoubtedly be faster than Bing.
Of course, as I mentioned, Google has been testing this since well before Bing was born, but the timing of a wider roll-out could well be a result of Bing. Google has denied making changes as a result of competitors in the past, most recently for its new “Caffeine” test, but at some point they have to concede that they do watch what rivals are doing and change plans accordingly — it would be foolish not to. It’s worth noting that Caffeine appears to use AJAX search results as well.
There’s also the issue of whether or not this speed increase really matters all that much? After all, both Google and Bing are now serving up results in fractions of a second, and any increase probably isn’t going to be perceived in a meaningful way by end users.
But remember, this is Google. A move to shave off fractions of a second definitely seems like something they would focus on, knowing that those fractions add up. Shave enough fractions of a second off of everyone’s searches and you’ll be supplying people with more time to do more searches — which of course means more ads served, and most importantly, more money.
So how will you know if you’re getting the AJAX results? Look at the URL. A normal Google Search has something like the following at its end:
/search?q=QUERY
An AJAX search result replaces that with something that looks like:
/#q=QUERY
As I mentioned, if you don’t see the AJAX results in your regular Google results, you can see it on the Caffeine test page here.
[photo: Paramount Pictures]
Word MG!
I search like 100 keywords a day and bing throws up some inconclusive results and if you use it more regularly, you will realize, it does not give relevant search results over a series of keywords.
Its like 10 years behind what Google is now
for example try keyword
load ppc adwords in yahoo…
it is a complex keyword which even i did not type properly, what i’m looking for is to upload adwords campaign into yahoo search marketing.
yet, Google gave 7th result as what i was looking for, Bing came no where closer…its freaking amazing, spark of genius of how Google can read my mind or whatever it does..it knows what I’m looking for…
Try these find cheap keywords
bing gives cheap books and cheap flights and even cheap recipes….get a life..i want keywords not cheap
That is cool how did you pull that off.
Generally Google uses more advanced JavaScript to make search result pages load even faster by only loading new information as needed on new queries. But AJAX Google would undoubtedly be faster than Bing. I think it would be great if all search providers changed their URLs to prevent the leaking of search terms in Referer headers. Doing so would plug what has always been a terrible privacy leak.
What’s wrong? I still see the ? mark on both Google and the Caffeine thing
“people will more time to do” should be “with more time to do”
first, btw.
OK, not first. (Sigh.)
heh. not first, but true!
The slow part of search is coming up with the query, not waiting for results to load. Google should be investing in hardware that clips onto your monitor, aimed at your head, that uses extremely sensitive infrared cameras and electrical field detectors to read your mind.
Such technologies can only lead to relationship problems.
The speed search competition has started. Great job by Google. Bing and Yahoo puts efforts to take away Google users. But Google is no easy opponent. It is trying to race up everything and conquer with speed.
One important side effect of this is that it disables the ability for analytics providers to give data on search query referrals – the #hash portion of a url isn’t passed in the HTTP Referer header.
I would imagine that they’ll find a way to provide this data for Google Analytics, but 3rd party web analytics providers are going to be screwed.
yes, the first link i have in there to searchengineland looks at that more in-depth.
I think it would be great if ALL search providers changed their URLs to prevent the leaking of search terms in Referer headers. Doing so would plug what has always been a terrible privacy leak.
I’ve never understood why some people get upset about cookies (which are great tools for limiting leakage of private data between sites) but don’t get upset about the vast quantities of data that spills through the Referer hole.
bob wyman
Search terms in the headers are a tremendous boon for web site operators and allow us to customize your landing page to be more relevant. Let’s say you’re a music store, and a customer somehow gets to your home page (rather than a product detail page) by searching for “white stripes CD”. Wouldn’t it be better for you and for your customer to see content relevant or similar to a white stripes CD on that page?
Cookies, Referrers, etc… and the question of how many folks are using anything that alters so-called tracking settings ( (i.e. network.http.sendRefererHeader, etc…) is going to be a default setting or disclosure in client software eventually for desktop/laptop experiences. In mobile, the advent of DPI and analytic flexing (Sprint’s big-brother stats commercial) will probably extend the fish in a barrel mindset for years to come.
[tinfoil hat on]
At the same time, I also think cookies and referrers will pale in comparison to DNS queries as the serving platforms evolve to split those queries to individual and dynamic DNS entries that cannot be shielded as easily. One of these CDN groups within (or aquired by) the Internet titans will imagineer a flip on the url shortening service approach where everything served is a unique has value to create a GUID FQDN. The notion of a URL goes away and everything becomes a moment in time hash mapping per subscriber surfing experience. No regular expressions… all dynamic hashes. Bye bye ad blocking. To surf is to be p0wn3d per click.
Or not.
[/tinfoil hat on]
Google thought of that and is passing people through a forwarder that contains the SERP. So the format will appear a bit different (it starts out /url? instead of /search? for example), but you’ll still see what someone searched for. Google detailed that here:
http://analytic...com-search.html
“an AJAX Google would undoubtedly be faster than Bing” – I like your neutral point of view
i mean they’re already neck and neck now (depending on what you read one is slightly faster than the other and vice versa), so is there really any question that google doing something to significantly decrease load time would push it ahead? i dont think so.
using ajax would really have nothing to do with improving query speed. that is entirely a database issue. the best it could do is lighten DB load by improving efficiency an insignificant amount. it might improve the user experience though
You think Google uses a database to serve up search results?
Bwahahahwahahawaaahawaahahahahaahahawaahaaaa
i’m sure it’s in there somewhere–point is that ajax isn’t going to help speed their query retrieval
Sorry to be harsh, but you really have no idea what you’re talking about.
I love it how people like you dismiss another person’s comment, when you actually have shown no understanding of the point.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about”
“Go away”
“Who took my cheese?”
How about you provide some substance to your post so everybody else can jump all over your opinion?
Interesting. I did a search on Caffeine then went back to google.com to do a search and noticed it was also using AJAX. Maybe it’s got something to do with a cookie?
google rocks
heh
they have had this fora long time. and so does bing.
you might do some research…
0.0001 secon vs 0.0002 second
WHO GIVES A SHIT
Gee, what a scientific and totally not crappy response.
Sarcasm aside, emerging technologies rolling into established products is a huge deal. This is a space where major companies changing even the slightest technology can make a difference in dollars. So, while you may not experience the difference first hand in terms of reduced load time, if AJAX can be used to continue to improve search response time, it keeps Google on top of the competition against Bing.
People who can spell the word ’second’ properly.
Maybe Stan was shaving a bit off the secon[d]
The savings may not matter on one search but when you are serving up as much as google saving .0001 on every search adds up quickly.
very interesting to see how fast things move when a competitor rises up. For now it’s speed then it’s pricing of ads that will matter in the end for both Bing and Google.
And their off !!! It’s bing is coming around the stretch. Oh wait it’s Google making moves faster then speed of light.
It’s very simple in words but in fact, much nesootvetsvuet, not all cheerfully!.
making google search faster well i though it was already fast i mean even if it is faster would we be able to notice it. I mean seriously how much time does it take to come up when you search on google?? about a second i guess
I agree with you.Its already fast for us,making it even faster is like taking some haystack off so we can search the needle faster.
Which is hardly noticeable(it is still a needle in a haystack)
but not to say that I’m saying doing the search on Google is taking that long..but you get the idea
It’s not about the results coming faster. They come at the speed they do because that’s how fast google wants them to come. It’s more like they find as good of results as they can, then give whatever they have after so much time has passed. The more they can do in that time the better the results will be, with the time staying relatively constant. With AJAX they can give you some results, then improve them without making you wait.
Yes Google is sweating it out as Bing is on $100 million ad bing and google needs to improve its real time search consistently to keep up with Internet Technology.
what is “Internet Technology”? did you just make that one up?
One part of me feels that competition is a lovely thing. Google is developing an OS and MS is launching a rival search engine. Let the games begin!
But on the other hand, my life is complicated enough. Just let me work in peace already!
Right now, I really don’t see the point of Bing… I’ve used it a few times and have never gotten really great results.
The critic in me feels that the friendly folks at Microsoft should find a nice little niche and stick to it (operating systems). And Google should focus and refine what they do best (Search).
We did some comparisons of the search and index page speeds a while back..
http://www.serv...ask-vs-twitter/
Google was barely ahead of Bing in search speeds and on index page loads – Yahoo was #1 and Google was #5!
The Internet is getting exponentially bigger everyday. I wonder whether all this focus on search speed has more to do with maintaining the status quo, than leapfrogging competitors. If Google sat on their butts, wouldn’t their search eventually become slower since there would be more stuff to search?
I’m not completely sure I understand the way google uses Ajax. From what I can tell, they perform the same search or a modified search and only display the changes in the results. If that’s the case, then altough users may feel a bit of an improvement (not likely) in query time, nothing will change on the server side – the query isn’t modified, so server resources aren’t saved…therefore, the fractions of seconds saved won’t add up because they only exist on the client side.
There’s probably more to it though..
I really don’t understand this focus on shaving a bit of time on getting results back. Surely more of the focus should be to give the user a more relevant experience, not one whereby the user has to keep using the back button when the search result isn’t what they were looking for. I am sure that search engines have loads of stats on people moving away if search results take too long, but this to me anyway isn’t dealing with search relevancy, its just keeping people within their site-not what the consumer is ultimately looking for.
Its actually slower for me.
Since it start Google is constantly evolving. That has nothing to do with Bing. Bing has to do the same … but that is possibly not an interesting story.
And btw: For years Google is talking about how important it is to deliver the results very fast.
I don’t like it! It’s slower… and actually a little buggy. I just clicked on the “Settings” dropdown at the top and it screwed up the page completely – in FF.
Arrrrggghhhh… I’m not too happy about this change!
More and more people are hooking up to bing..and with bing getting on yahoo – we have a serious fight in front to enjoy and it’s good for the SE industry that we are getting healthy competition.
I tried to manually force an AJAX search query by typing in the URL using the # notation for querying.
But alas… it didn’t work.
I may be being a little ignorant here (and haven’t read every comment) – but aren’t we missing the point?
If the search can be “improved” after it has first been carried out, surely this is the real time search engine we’ve been wondering about that can bring in immediate content from Twitter etc as its posted?
It’s noticeably faster.
I don’t know about you, but a few hours ago you wrote almost the same article talking about Bing flying on AJAX, which happened to show up in my Google Reader stream (http://img442.i...2/8443/bing.png). Now, when I try to visit that article (http://www.tech...-api-in-action/), I get a “page not found” error. Instead it seems like you completely rewrote it into the article posted above to favor, if not promote, Google instead Bing. Bias much?