The iconic search site Wednesday unveiled the new feature on Google.com and to a packed auditorium of tech writers in San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art — no doubt doing vanity searches to see how quickly their names came up.
And they do come up fast. Google Instant is like the familiar ’suggested search’ type-ahead, but on Javascript steroids: Typing even a single letter will fill the screen with results based on popular queries that begin with just that character. For example, starting a search on ‘S’ loads yield a top hit of Skype (Sears and sfgate.com for others). As usual, you can see other suggestions below the search query box, and now additionally you see the word Google guessed for you in gray type ahead of what you’ve typed so far.
You can then accept that word by tabbing, or you can choose another suggestion by using the up or down. When you scroll through those, the results load, without you ever having to hit the return key.
“There is a psychic element because we can predict what you are about to search on in real time,” Google vice president Marissa Mayer told the press conference. The enhancement may comically provide fodder to the crowd which actually believes Google already knows what you think, but Mayer reminded the assembled that the idea of Google being able to guess what you want before you finish typing was so far out 10 years ago that it was the company’s April Fool’s joke.
Search remains a core function on the web, and with a 70+ percent market share the amount of time people spend searching might actually be a productivity issue — or so Google argues. It takes about 9 seconds to enter a search into Google, Mayer explained. With Google Instant, each search could take 2 to 5 seconds less time. If everyone on the planet used Google Instant for their searches, she said, it would save about 3.5 billion seconds a day, or 11 hours saved every second.
As the FAQ page explains: “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.”
Starting Wednesday, users running Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE8 in the U.S. will begin seeing the new results. Google is also rolling out the service to users in the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Russia so long as they are signed-in. U.S. users do not need to be signed in.
A version of the streaming results will be available on mobile devices this fall, the company said. Google also will bring the service to its Chrome browser, where users can search directly from the address bar.
Suggestions will not include words associated with pornography, violence or hate speech, and results can be filtered as previously using Google’s Safe Search settings. It can also be turned off entirely, but it is is ‘on’ by default.
The update is a big change for the search giant, which used to pride itself on how little time it took its lightweight homepage to load.
While the new update adds little in the way of words or clutter, it’s reliance on JavaScript (which also has to load with the home page) shows the search giant thinks that there’s more to a great search engine than relevant results and initial page load speed. The company also says that it will automatically turn off the instant search when a user is on a slow connection.
As an engineering feat, it’s pretty remarkable. If a typical query is 20 characters long, Google would have to do 20 searches instead of just one. Google said it was able to reduce that load significantly using some smart caching and some prioritization of queries.
Source:http://www.wired.com
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