Google made a pretty significant announcement today: Google Instant.

In a nutshell, it is instant search results. As you type into the seach box, it will begin pre-populating search results. It will also predict (as close as it can) what you may be trying to search for and give it to you.

A few bullet points:

• It is rolling out starting today in the U.S. It will be rolling out to other countries over the coming weeks.
• It only works if you’re logged into your Google account.
• There is an option right next to the search box to turn it off if you think it is annoying.
• It only works on the web at this point. Having it work from browser-started searches is in the making. “in the next few months”, they say. Mobile browsers will be supported soon, too.
• You’re going to need a modern browser to make it work. Firefox, Chrome, IE and Safari.
• They’ve built in censors so that Instant doesn’t pop up questionable stuff without consent. You’ll have to hit the Enter key to get that, like usual.

The timing of this announcement is rather ironic for me. Just days ago, Rich and I were having a private chat about this. My prediction at the time was that this wouldn’t see the light of day for some time. I thought that people would find it annoying and I thought the extra load on Google’s systems would be too much. At the least, I told Rich it wouldn’t come out without an option to turn it off. At least I was right about that one.

In terms of load issues, Google actually addressed this in their announcement. They found a lot of ways to minimize the load and make it doable on a widespread basis.

My Take On Google Instant

I checked it out. It is handy, I must say.

In most day-to-say searches, I think it doesn’t add a whole lot to the experience. If you know what you’re searching for, then you’ll end up just typing it. Where Instant comes in handy is when you’re trying to find something that you can’t put into words on your own. It does a pretty handy job at it, too.

For example, start typing something into the box. The results will begin coming. If you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, you can use the arrow keys to go up and down in the Suggested searches. As you do it, the search results refresh.

In terms of people freaking out that this will change things like search engine optimization, it won’t. It only impacts the speed of results, but the rankings and the way that works remain the same.

All in all, I think Instant is a worthy addition – especially since they’ve provided an easy way to turn it off for people who don’t prefer it. Google claims it will save about 350 million user hours per year. The number is unprovable, really, but hey – you never know.

Will this work out for Google? The jury is out. It sounds like they put some real testing into it. Since search is their #1 bread-winner, they wouldn’t mess with it just for the sake of giving it a try (think Google Wave). You would think they’d be a lot more careful about it. The feedback I’ve seen on Twitter as the announcement unfolded was almost uniformly positive.

Basically, it comes down to this…

Google did it. I think a lot of people will dig it. But, a site as popular as google.com can’t change something without pissing people off. The typical haters who like to bash anything new will frown upon it, but that’s about as predictive as gravity. In the end, they can just turn it off. Besides, you need to be logged into a Google account to see it anyway. In the end, this will stay (at least I think so). The one thing that may possibly happen is to make it default to NO instead of YES on whether to use instant results. We shall see.

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