It's time to go ogle Google Instant and save time

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 09 September 2010 11:02

Business IT - Technology

Google Instant puts a new face on the widely-used search engine by presenting the results as you type a query.

Google's search engine has offered autocompletion of search strings for some time, but the company has now gone a step further by returning search results while the string is being typed.

For example, in iTWire's tests, the string "melb" autocompleted to "melbourne" and results for the city of Melbourne (the one in Australia) appeared on the screen. Google refers to this capability as 'search-before-you-type'.

Initially available on google.com to users that are signed into a Google account, Google Instant will be extended to "everyone in the US in the coming days," a Google spokesperson stated. The company plans to add the feature to google.com.au and google.com.nz in the coming weeks. It will also be available to signed-in users of the company's sites for France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain and the UK.

Google Instant requires Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer 8.

"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 optimisation of page-rendering JavaScript to help web browsers keep up with the rest of the system," said Marissa Mayer, Google's VP search products and user experience,

Who wins, who loses? See page 2.