Search before you TYPE
It sounds normal if you search as you type. While you are typing you are getting continuous results about what you typed in. Its beneficial, specially for those who use to search on Mobile phones. But it is also clumsy because it will also provide results for the incompletely typed words which contains complete words like for example I want to search about “music formats” and while typing you can get results about “music for …” or “music forms” while typing.
But how cool it would it be if get the results **before** typing the whole search query. You will have to just type a word from the query and you will get the relevant results. And the service is Google Instant which will search-before-you-type.
But as we can imagine searching before typing but its not that much easy the practical implementation side and this is why it is becoming an exciting service from Google. 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, Google needed a host of new technologies with new enhanced caching systems and the ability to control the rate at which the results pages are shown to the users and an optimization of page-rendering JavaScript to help web browsers to remain up with the system. And at last a system that was able to scale while searching as fast as people can type and think. And yes all these things while maintaining the relevance and simplicity which is being expected from Google.
The user benefits of Google Instant are many—but the primary one is time saved. Google had tested it and the results have 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, they estimate that they will save their users’ 11 hours with each passing second!
Google Instant will become the core search experience on Google.com for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE 8. Google will 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, Google is working to roll out Google Instant to all geographies and platforms.Give Google Instant a try and let us know what you think!