14 DAY TRIAL // When Google Instant launched, it was quite a bit departure from the classic search interface. Results would start loading as soon as you type, new sets coming in as you refine your query. There were obvious advantages to the approach, but like any big change, there were bound to be people who didn't like it.
No surprise then that there were plenty of critics and plenty of people worrying about ad spending, long-tail queries, slowdowns, even traffic consumption.
Turns out that the actual users, the vast majority of them, didn't care. In fact, Google says that Instant has a 98 percent adoption rate, this for a site with hundreds of millions of monthly users.
Google left the possibility to opt-out of Instant to users who didn't like the feature or had problems with it. Google Instant is enabled by default, but there is an "off switch" right beside the search bar.
The off button isn't one of the most popular links on the Google homepage it seems, as only 2 percent of visitors used it. Most people like Instant, or are not bothered enough to turn it off.
At first glance, a 98 percent adoption rate looks like a huge success when you own the most popular website in the world.
But, since Instant is enabled by default it doesn't actually mean that 98 percent of the users like it. At the same time, people get used rather fast to changes and new features, despite the initial upheaval.
Facebook knows this best, each time it makes even the slightest of changes, plenty of users find it more than irritating, threatening to close their accounts and so on. Every single time though, things die down and Facebook moves forward as usual.
If sites like Google or Facebook removed a feature every time some or even a lot of users complain, nothing would ever change. Which would probably make the same users complain about how the sites are stagnating.