You may have seen the announcement yesterday of Google Instant on the official Google Blog. Instant, they say is "a simple and straightforward idea—people can get results as they type their queries". If you have used Google you will have noticed tha change.

So what's the big fuss about? (Apart from the fact that at present I just find it exceedingly annoying). Well, it's reasonably clever - as they say :"Instant takes what you have typed already, predicts the most likely completion and streams results in real-time for those predictions—yielding a smarter and faster search that is interactive, predictive and powerful." Hmmm.

There's a video too:

I'm not sure that the video is anything more than a puff piece and when you look at some of the comments on YouTube such as:

"OK, i need search a Potato recipe......

 Google

Po

"Porn"

-Did you find the recipe?

-what recipe?"

OK I admit there are likely to be more insulsts than compliments in comments and as they say in their blog release it did need: " a host of new technologies including new caching systems, the ability to adaptively control the rate at which we show results pages and an optimization of page-rendering JavaScript to help web browsers keep up with the rest of the system. In the end, we needed to produce a system that was able to scale while searching as fast as people can type and think—all while maintaining the relevance and simplicity people expect from Google"

But does it work? Do you like it? Is not having to hit enter a great leap forward in search?

Only you can say.

P.S. This is what Matt Cutts of Google has to say about Instant.

Post written by Richard Hill