Google have announced Instant pages. http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/14/google-announces-instant-pages-instant-image-search-and-instant-availability-in-32-languages/
If you just want to look at the video which explains it is here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Jn93FDx9oI&feature=player_embedded
They preload the first result "if they think it is what you will click on" - they don't mention whether they will do that if it is a places result that comes first in the search. I can see this having been useful in 1994 on the 14.4 modem.
so many possible things to say, and I'm not sure I can be arsed to actually say any of them. I must be getting really really jaded. :-\
looking at those comments its apparantly very exciting to the average demi-geek though.
I understand that the next version will be even faster. When you visit Google.com they are just going to redirect you to whatever page they think you should be visiting.
I don't use chrome, but I can see home would find precaching and preloading as a feature assuming the bandwidth is wide enough that the end user doesn't notice the drag of all the used but unseen bandwidth.
I guess a few questions to ask would be:
What does this do to page impressions?
Does chrome accept cookies without the user actually viewing the page?
If either of the above are true it seems exploitable.
That's interesting, but I was thinking more from the perspective of cookies stuffing. Folks may be able to get their commission earning cookies onto people's browsers without earning the click.
In Amit Singhal's opinion piece in Politico he blunlty states which page is preloaded:
This week, we took another step toward helping you find answers even faster. We announced Instant Pages — which, when activated, gets the top search result ready in the background while you're choosing which link to click. That way, when you do click, the page loads instantly — saving you yet another two to five seconds on typical searches.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0611/57133_Page2.html
I was wondering about the "result most likely to be clicked on" thing. If that wasn't the first result you would really need to ask some questions about the logic of their ranking.
well, only if you go with the view that personalisation always trumps best results - it might be that one person always clicks on a wikipedia result, but the best result is the brand domain, what should be #1?
I still can't get around the pavlovian reaction to this - who really needs to save whatever proportion of the load time it takes for the main content to be readable and why are people so enthusiastic? Its like watching a new apple product announced and Google stuff doesn't normally get people that excited, did they hire cheerleaders?
Quotetwo to five seconds
.. but only on whichever site Google thinks I should look at
whoop-de-f**king-doo
also...
Bandwidth stealing bastards!