Social Media and Marketing

Google is promising a new way that helps users find information faster by showing relevant results as a query is typed.

Published: 09 Sep 2010

Google is promising a new way that helps users find information faster by showing relevant results as a query is typed.

Google has just announced its “streaming search” service, Google Instant. The new offering is coming out of limited Beta testing and is starting to roll-out to users on Google domains in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia.

It will be available on following browsers: Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac and Internet Explorer v8.

“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,” stated the company.

According to the company, the most obvious change is that one gets to the right content much faster than before because one doesn’t have to finish typing 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,” added Google.

Google says its 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,” said Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience, Google.

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.