Google makes one of the world’s leading mobile operating systems. It does e-mail and an office suite and photo sharing and Internet phone service, and does them all well. It’s even getting into solar power and is trying to invent the self-driving car. But for all its far-flung ambition, the company isn’t synonymous with many things. It’s synonymous with one thing: its namesake search engine, the business that started it all.
At a press conference in San Francisco this week, a small army of Google search honchos took the stage to reveal new stuff. Unlike last September’s launch event for Google Instant, which shows results as you type, this one didn’t involve any single radical change. Instead, it spotlighted a bunch of medium-sized tweaks which Google’s rolling out in the days and weeks to come.
Google saved the new feature with the most potential to make the largest number of people happy until last. It’s called “Instant Pages,” and it aims to dramatically reduce the delay between when you click on a search result and when the page in question is fully loaded in your browser. While you’re examining a page of search results, Instant Pages will be busy behind the scenes, silently downloading and rendering the first page in the results. If you then click on that top result — and odds are that you will — the page will pop into place nearly instantly in many cases.
According to Google, Instant Pages can typically save you 2-5 seconds per search. What’s not to like? Just one thing, really — like Voice Search, it only works in Google’s own web browser, Chrome. That could change in the future: Google says that it built Instant Pages using open standards that other browser makers can use, and that it may add it to a future version of its Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox. But for now, Chrome users will get the most Googley version of Google.
Taken one by one, all these new features look good. Here’s the thing, though: This search engine didn’t get where it was today by having the most features. It thrived because it gave you almost nothing but a minimalist search field on an otherwise barren home page — and was still able to deliver the most relevant results in the business. The Google staffers at this week’s event kept reiterating that the company is obsessively committed to making its products as fast as possible. But for this Google user, at least, simplicity trumps even speed.
Even before the new announcements, I’d been fretting about Google getting dragged into the sinkhole of cluttered complexity. For instance, I’m still not entirely sold on Google Instant, the feature that gives you results before you’re done asking for them. When I type “john” into the search field, I immediately get information on John Wayne Airport in Irvine, California — which strikes me as an unhelpful interruption if I’m beginning a search for John Paul Jones or Johnny Cash.
I’m not saying that Google is blundering by adding so many new capabilities. Overall, in fact, it’s long done an expert job of weaving new functionality in so artfully that it’s easy to forget it wasn’t always there. But when you’re as good as Google already is, you don’t have to evolve into something different — you just need to keep on being yourself, only more so. And the more Google changes, the tougher that’s going to get.
McCracken blogs about personal technology at Technologizer, which he founded in 2008 after nearly two decades as a tech journalist; on Twitter, he’s @harrymccracken. His column, also called Technologizer, appears every Thursday on TIME.com.
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