Google Instant: because they can

Google Instant has caused a wave of news this week, from people raving about the impact, to those that are worried it will change online marketing forever (for the worse) by further increasing the demand to be the top search result.

One aspect that struck me as very interesting is that this move significantly increases the number of search results Google will have to handle.   Is this truely a feature to save people time, or is it also a push to leverage their size to create distance from the competition by doing something that isn’t feasible unless you have the engineering and server resources of Google?

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-instant-behind-scenes.html covers some of the work that went into the effort – handling about 7 times more search queries without having to have 7 times more infrastructure.

Competitors take heed: Google feels the pressure building and isn’t ready to give up any search share anytime soon.  Competitors will need to let Google take the lead on this one and see if it will move the needle on search share before trying to follow suit as this will take a large investment and the value to users seems to be questionable.

For me Google Instant Search is irrelevant as 99% of the time I search from the Omnibar in Chrome or the search box in Firefox or IE, and until the feature comes to those search boxes I won’t see it unless I go looking for it.

Updated: Embeding Flash in Facebook Dialog box

Previously I wrote about embedding flash in a facebook dialog box. However the technique used doesn't work anymore - the fb:js-string tags aren't working reliably, and when they do their is some new "features" to the dialog box that is preventing my previous code from working in all browsers.

I've whipped up a new approach, and tested it in IE8, IE8 in Compatibility View, Chrome 6, and Firefox 3.6.6. This should work in other browsers as well, though its important to note that Facebook has announced that FBML is going away; at the end of this year no new FBML apps can be created.

This version starts with going back to the fb:dialog tag in FBML instead of using the FBJS new Dialog(). The most important part of using this is creating an id in the body of the dialog we can find via javascript once the dialog is open.

This is triggered by the typical clicktoshowdialog="mydialog" attribute on a link, however at the same time we also put a onclick event on the same link. This fires and we leverage javascript to find the placeholder in the dialog, create a swf object and inject it into the dialog, then back track and change the dialog title. Only one fb:dialog is used for however many dialogs you actually want.

Here's the code:
<script language="javascript"> function myDialog(title,videoUrl) { var swfObj = document.createElement('fb:swf'); swfObj.setId('video'); swfObj.setWidth('230'); swfObj.setHeight('154'); swfObj.setSWFSrc(videoUrl); swfObj.loop = false; var placeHolderObj = document.getElementById("placeHolder"); placeHolderObj.setInnerXHTML("<div>.</div"); placeHolderObj.appendChild(swfObj); var h2span = placeHolderObj.getParentNode().getParentNode().getElementsByTagName('h2')[0]; h2span.setInnerXHTML('<span>' +title + '</span>'); return false; } </script> <div id="linkSection"> <a href="#" clicktoshowdialog="my_dialog" onClick="myDialog('pork and beans','http://www.youtube.com/v/PQHPYelqr0E?fs=1&hl=en_US')">click for video 1</a> <br/> <a href="#" clicktoshowdialog="my_dialog" onClick="myDialog('feels good', 'http://www.youtube.com/v/8u84d7nY8pQ?fs=1&hl=en_US')">click for video 2</a> <br/> </div> <fb:dialog id="my_dialog"> <fb:dialog-title>My Dialog</fb:dialog-title> <fb:dialog-content> <div id="placeHolder">.</div> </fb:dialog-content> <fb:dialog-button type="button" value="close" close_dialog="true" /> </fb:dialog>