Google Instant

So, its out.

Google releases a major change to the UI after the autocomplete and spell-suggest addons, which is called Google Instant. It supposedly borrows its name from the Instant Coffee ,which is quite popular in the corporate world and Instant Noodles, which is very popular in Japan and among couch potatoes/geeks/kids. Google's innovations are also like these - Fresh, fun-filled and utilitarian.

With the release of this change, you don't need to press the Search Button for any of your queries any more. Google will search while you type by combining an old technique called 'Incremental Search' designed by an engineer Amit Patel, and Google's now popular Autocomplete feature. When you start typing itself, Google predicts a list of possible queries and in addition, brings you the results of the top ranked query among that.

Its kinda weird after all these years of conventional search that we have been doing. But it helps out a lot when you are not so sure about the query that you need to give in , to get to the data you want. You can straight-away decide whether you need to type the whole story , or just the first few words are enough. This definitely is an improvement, and not a revolution, because all it does is add to the overall user experience and reduce search time.

I was just watching the Live Streaming of its release and talk by the famous Marissa Mayer (VP of Search ,Google) and the product managers and technical leads behind this quirky innovation, that is Google Instant. They showed some really cool search examples in the video, and I was excited to watch it all. But a tweeple friend of my Chetan Gole also tweeted out the additional capability of Google Instant to be morally conscious. It won't support any kind of swear words or profanities in its predictive real time searches. Wow!!

Currently, this feature is released on in the US version of the page, and will be rolled out for signed in users in other versions like Spain,Russia,UK, France and Italy. It will be available on the IE8,Firefox, Safari and of course Chrome.So keep your eyes peeled out for its release to Indian version and the default search page of your browser as well.

The new age of search is here...