Google Instant

[Antithesis]

Search as you type. It’s a simple and straightforward idea—people can get results as they type their queries. Imagining the future of search, the idea of being able to search for partial queries or provide some interactive feedback while searching has come up more than a few times. Along the way, we’ve even built quite a few demos (notably, Amit Patel in 1999 and Nikhil Bhatla in 2003). Our search-as-you-type demos were thought-provoking—fun, fast and interactive—but fundamentally flawed. Why? Because you don’t really want search-as-you-type (no one wants search results for [bike h] in the process of searching for [bike helmets]). You really want search-before-you-type—that is, you want results for the most likely search given what you have already typed.

As you can imagine, searching even before someone types isn’t easy—which is why we are so excited today to be unveiling Google Instant. Google Instant is search-before-you-type. Instant takes what you have typed already, predicts the most likely completion and streams results in real-time for those predictions—yielding a smarter and faster search that is interactive, predictive and powerful.

Here are a few of the core features in Google Instant:

Dynamic Results - Google dynamically displays relevant search results as you type so you can quickly interact and click through to the web content you need.

Predictions - One of the key technologies in Google Instant is that we predict the rest of your query (in light gray text) before you finish typing. See what you need? Stop typing, look down and find what you’re looking for.

Scroll to search - Scroll through predictions and see results instantly for each as you arrow down.

Here’s a video that explains Google Instant in greater depth:



To bring Google Instant to life, we needed a host of new technologies including new caching systems, the ability to adaptively control the rate at which we show results pages and an optimization of page-rendering JavaScript to help web browsers keep up with the rest of the system. In the end, we needed to produce a system that was able to scale while searching as fast as people can type and think—all while maintaining the relevance and simplicity people expect from Google.

The user benefits of Google Instant are many—but the primary one is time saved. Our testing has shown that Google Instant saves the average searcher two to five seconds per search. That may not seem like a lot at first, but it adds up. With Google Instant, we estimate that we’ll save our users 11 hours with each passing second!

As part of our current rollout, Google Instant will become the core search experience on Google.com for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE 8. We’ll also be offering Google Instant to our users in France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain and the U.K. who are signed in and have Instant-capable browsers. Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll work to roll out Google Instant to all geographies and platforms.

We’re very excited about today’s announcement and hope that you are too. Give Google Instant a try and let us know what you think!

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/...d-of-type.html

I'm aware there was a thread in General on the Google "Balls" that led into Google Instant but I though showing off the blog post and video here in Tech would give some people a little more information on what exactly is going on.

[Baelorn]

Instant is nice but not very useful imo. I'm loving this Scribe(http://scribe.googlelabs.com/) though. I want it to work on everything lol. It took some getting used to but once you get comfortable with it it really speeds things up.

[Kerberoz]

I really don't see how this can save you time unless you type 10wpm.

[Baelorn]

I really don't see how this can save you time unless you type 10wpm.

You don't see how hitting a single number is faster than typing several letters or words?

[shaddix]

Well I've been using it and it's okay I guess. It doesn't update instantly, you have to stop typing for results to change. The best thing about it is not having to press return keystroke I suppose.

[virusiidx]

It's pretty cool so far, though I have to actually slow down on typing to take advantage of the live results.

Scribe is pretty fun to play with though.

[Norellicus]

The move from the main search page to the instant results is nauseating.

I worry about the kind of misfired results you can get from a partial string as well, since some terms on the Internet are pretty horrific without additional context >_>

[Souj]

I thought I was going crazy when I couldnt remember hitting Enter, but results were showing.
And yeah, Don't really see this being all that useful unless you don't know how to spell a word, or type slow. It's better than nothing though, I suppose.

[shaddix]

I turned it off, got annoying having the search results bounce up and down the page because of the suggested search options.

[Franzer]

simply put, i hate google instant. maybe i'm old fashioned though

[dejet]

its ok. I do not see it as being a big deal. Its nice, and it can lead to something better I guess.

I did not even notice it till I saw this thread lol