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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

This does not bode well for the employees at google. You get extra features like this (instant preview) when you have too much manpower - you look for things for your employees to do.

But if your customers don't want it, and you can't find anything else for them to do then you start reducing the workforce.

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When Google released Instant Preview they claimed it increases click through rates to a website. This makes me think a good number of customers do want it.

Edit: here is the announcement: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/beyond-instant-result...

"In our testing, we’ve found that people who use Instant Previews are about 5% more likely to be satisfied with the results they click. "

How do they measure satisfaction? Is it that people are assumed to have been satisfied with their results if they don't come back?

people who use Instant Previews are about 5% more likely to be satisfied with the results they click.

This sounds too little to justify a UI change that increases complexity.

5% of a billion monthly users is more then enough justification. At Google's scale fractions of a percent are often worth it.

That's 100% of the same user base who have to deal with a more complex user interface with more usability snafus and one that evolves less well. If you make a couple of dozen such UI changes based on similarly narrow evidence of improvement, you will end up with a mess.

It isn't 100% of the user base. I would guess the majority of users don't care/use/know about page caches so overall it is a simpler UI. The simpler UI will improve the UX for 80% users (lets say for the sake of the argument) and the other 20% will either be able to figure out the marginal increased complexity or will be outweighed by the improvement of the previously mentioned users.

Instant preview had "Bing fear" written all over it. Probably the biggest feature on Google Search that I found the least use for. I don't understand why Google feels the need to play catch up to Bing.

From my short experience as an intern and much longer experience being friends with several google folks: Bing fear is a disease inside Google. They've done a large number of unreasonable things because Microsoft was looming large on some manager's mind.

Totally agree. There is a reason I don't use Bing...I don't like all the clutter. Now Google seems to think that adding more stuff to a SERP is going to help them save market share...I don't get it.

They must be testing this stuff, so maybe it's just me. I could get used to Google Instant....but not sure about Instant Preview.

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