Google is always cooking up new ideas
in its "Google Labs", and today the search engine giant is
revealing its latest new feature to help quicken the search
experience. Google
Instant, which is being rolled out now to Google users, displays
search results as you type.
Instead of waiting until you press the
enter button to deliver your search results, Google Instant will
instantly start culling search results and display them below the
search bar. The more you type, the more refined the search results
become. Here are 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.
Google explains:
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.
Google Instant is said to save (on
average) 2 to 5 seconds per search. Google loves to tout numbers, and
it says that Google Instant will save more than 3.5 billion seconds a
day if computer users were to switch to Google Instant.
Google Instant is being rolled out to
users of Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac, and Internet
Explorer v8.
You can watch a demo of Google Instant in action here.
