In a Web 2.0 site, how long (in sec) should a newly added tag take to show and be indexed for search?

Question

I'm building a web 2.0 site with tagging functionality and wanted to get a sense from anyone with experience how long (in sec) the system can take to a) show a new tag on a given record and b) index the tag for search. For example, does a newly added tag have to be available for search in 1 second but show on the user's screen in .1 seconds?

Answer 1

How long do you want it to take?

Answer 2

I think this is really dependent on the type of site, size of site, overall complexity and user expectations.

You will have to balance everything to meet your needs, I don't believe there there is any de-facto standard that says it must be X seconds.

Responsiveness is important, but certain audiences are more forgiving than others, and certain systems need certain levels of performance.

Also, the users interface for addition is a big factor on how long it should display to the user and how you go about it.

Answer 3

It depends on how you handle changes. This should be consistent.

But anything that suffers this kind of delay should be detectable in the UI: a tag added but not yet available should display in a way that identifies it as added but not yet available, so the user doesn't believe they've encountered an error where they have not.

Answer 4

I'd want it to show up on the record immediately - if I don't see it there on a refresh, I'm going to assume something went wrong when I added it and try adding it again.

It's far less important for it to show up in global tag clouds and search results immediately. Depends a lot on the site, but an hour or two would probably be okay in most cases.

Answer 5

@workmad, I'd like it to be immediate (.1 sec) on both but there are tradeoffs with index updating (we're using FAST) so I'm really looking for best practice here as opposed to my ideal.

@Mitchel, thanks. I agree that we need to take the overall site's responsiveness into consideration but, for example, do you think that users see a tagging system as broken if it both offers search by tag and then doesn't enable searchability of the tags I added, say, within the last minute? There's a balance here that I'm thinking users might generally accept between minutes and seconds on the indexing side and I'm wondering where that balance is. Thanks again for the thoughtful reply.

Answer 6

@ceejayoz - thanks. Much appreciated.

Answer 7

Like other people have said, it's dependent on the site's design, but be careful not to make delays look like errors.

Have you thought about usability testing to see what's reasonable for your site? There's no better way to get an answer to this question than to see what users actually expect.