Webform Podcast

I listened to the Webform design and beyond podcast and Luke a guy that used to work for Yahoo was being interviewed.
Luke's business card had "all the good stuff and none of the bad" ...I thought that was funny.
The main topic of conversation was about the new google feature-google instant. This is when the moment you type something, it pulls up in the search. This is googles new way to use servers. According to Luke, in 2005 yahoo already had came up with this and decided not to implement due to server load and system capacity issues of the live search. It did have a wow factor at the time though. But nowadays since people have higher expectations, the wow factor would obviously be a whole lot less compared to 2005. Now with google, instead of a single search, it is 10 searches. People are obviously used to instantaneous feedback. I personally actually did agree with Luke on his thoughts regarding the distraction that the instant live search creates. As the interviewer mentioned, its like talking to someone that I'm trying to finish my sentence without knowing what I am trying to say. There is a fine line between relevance and distraction.
According to Luke the search assist for yahoo was better than googles as it would go and scan the query and would come back with a more concise list based on what the user input and the results were a lot more relevant. Nowadays a lot of the real time search features are not being designed properly.

Another topic of conversation was about senior managers getting excited once they see a feature like google instant and they say it's so cool and should we do that or not? Ideas are always easy but when implementation time comes its a whole lot harder than what we think. According to Luke, for the yahoo search assist-the project lead went and hired a few engineers so they did a prototype. They had to modify it a few times before the idea got attraction. Again it looks easy but in reality its hard to implement. The Context that you try to implement this live search is another factor as well. In a e-commerce environment its different for example. However we can see the general pattern in multiple sites. Apple website search was an example that was brought up that was the same as googles model. Its the same design pattern however different context based on real data that is being interacted with. With all of these instant searches we still get instant result while typing.