Google Instant: Search Results Before You’re Done Thinking About it

It’s “Google’s decision to fix what wasn’t broken.”

That’s the rather skeptical reaction of Google critic Tom Krazit at Cnet.com, over Google’s recent release of the Google Instant results capability. If you have performed a search on Google over the last few days, you’ve probably noticed that the results you’re looking for are already on the page before you stop typing. It’s what Google calls its latest attempt to provide “search before you type.”

Yvonne Bell at Search Engine Journal says it’s Google’s attempt to take the guesswork out of search and put an end to the speed argument created by other real-time services such as Twitter.

If you run a search right now, you’ll notice how results can change literally letter by letter , at a speed that Google estimated to be 480 milliseconds.

Google says the three main advantages to Google instant are:

Dynamic Results: What you see is always relevant to what you’re typing and changes word for word, if necessary.

Predictions: This improvement to Google’s assumptive search capability predicts the rest of your search term in light gray text. As soon as you see what you’re looking for, stop typing and click.

Scroll to search: If Google pulls up several possible predictions for your search, you can scroll through them to get to the one you want faster.

Helen Popkin at msnbc’s Technolog sees another advantage to Google Instant in the “question-asking” category. Type in a “Where is” query , for example, and the most popoular results to this query pop up before you type in a qualifying noun. She calls it “instant access into the bizarrely awesome zeitgeist experienced by Google users.”

While Popkin finds Google Instant somewhat “creepy,” she also wonders whether you really have an alternative: “What are you gonna do – use Bing?”