Google Search gets instantaneous

Google officially unveiled Instant search at its San Francisco press event. This new feature shows results as you type and automatically updates every time you adjust your search query, enabling you to find whatever you need faster than ever before. The search giant claims the new feature can save 2-5 seconds per search, and extrapolates that if everyone uses Google Instant globally, the feature can save more than 3.5 billion seconds a day.

Instant is not available to anyone just yet, it will be rolled out to users signed into their Google accounts and at first it will only be available on the US, UK, French, German, Russian, Italian and Spanish versions of Google.

Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type.

The most obvious change is that you get to the right content much faster than before because you don’t have to finish typing your full search term, or even press “search.” Another shift is that seeing results as you type helps you formulate a better search term by providing instant feedback. You can now adapt your search on the fly until the results match exactly what you want. In time, we may wonder how search ever worked in any other way.