Sep 9, 2010

Google Instant.. Results as you type.. No clicks..

Google Instant is released on www.google.com couple of hours back. It's a great user experience as I've seen. Here are couple of screen shots I've taken to demonstrate and list down some positives and negatives I've observed.




+ It shows search results as you type.. no Click, no Enter. (In both images, I'vnt pressed Enter key)

+ It predicts your search and flashes results. (In the 1st image, I've typed only 2 letters "ad", and it predicted "adobe".)

+ When you press down arrow, it flashes result s...creen for respective suggestion. (In the 2nd image, I've typed "adobe" and pressed down arrow till "adobe reader". This makes me to look for Adobe products faster than ever)

+ Pressing right arrow will take you to the first result of the current suggestion. We got rid of "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, and this makes me to go to first result faster.

- This may increase the network load a little and hence some of the people at very low network speed may not like it. There is link next Search button to turn off the feature.

+ Some people guess that this may make search slower because it flashes so many different search result pages. Well, it's doesn't make it so slow as you may think. Extensive caching of searched results and improved indexing (recent launch of Caffeine) makes this not so tough job.

- It's released only for google.com domain, but not for specific countries' domains like google.co.in and google.co.uk. It'll be rolled out to the next set of domains in the next couple of weeks. But, co.in domain is not in the first set of domains :-(

The official site telling about Google Instant is www.google.com/instant.

Here are couple videos demonstrating the feature.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElubRNRIUg4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcm0rG8EKXI

I'll be happy see your comments.

Happy Searching,
Channa