As the Google Instant page mentions, “If everyone uses Google Instant globally, we estimate this will save more than 3.5 billion seconds a day. That’s 11 hours saved every second.” With over a billion searches a day and over a billion users searching each week, that adds up to 350 million hours of user time saved a year. That’s 500+ human lifespans saved a year by this feature if everyone uses it.
According to the search giant, Google Instant is all about making searching faster and more effective. Besides, you also need to type less as you can stop typing as soon as you see what you need. The company claims that this service saves 2 to 5 seconds and about 9 keystrokes per search on an average and helps users refine their queries by providing instant feedback. Check out this graph showing the average time to enter a search with Google Instant and before it :
How it works?
Just go to the Google homepage and start typing. Search results will be immediately displayed as soon as you start typing - even before you have pressed Enter. A list of predicted entries will also be displayed in a drop down menu below the search box.The first predicted entry is shown in light grey colour in the search box and the search results that you see instantly will be for that predicted entry. As you continue to type, the search results are updated to match the query that you are typing. If in case you want to see the results for only the search term that you've typed, just hit the Enter key or click the Search button.
Lets us see an example. Suppose you want to see the medal tally of the Delhi Common Wealth Games 2010. Go to Google homepage and start typying. when you've typed "cwg" you get predicted results for 'cwg opening ceremony", "cwg 2010", "cwg", "cwg live" etc.
But as soon as you type the next character "m" you get your desired search results for "cwg medal tally" along with a few other predictions.
Thus, you can see that even without typing the full search term or pressing the enter key, the required results were obtained, definitely saving a few seconds along with a few keystrokes.
No doubt, Google instant is a feature which most of us will love and I am pretty sure that very soon a time will come when we will wonder how we ever managed to search anything before it.
You can even check out the explanation of the working of Google Instant at Youtube.
In case you are not able to use Google Instant, make sure you are NOT doing any of the following points:
No doubt, Google instant is a feature which most of us will love and I am pretty sure that very soon a time will come when we will wonder how we ever managed to search anything before it.
You can even check out the explanation of the working of Google Instant at Youtube.
In case you are not able to use Google Instant, make sure you are NOT doing any of the following points:
- You are searching from a page that's not the Google homepage or a search results page
- You are searching from your iGoogle page rather than the classic homepage
- You are searching using Google SSL
- You are using using an Internet browser that's not one of these supported browsers: Firefox 3 and later versions, Safari 5 for Mac and later versions, Internet Explorer 8, and Google Chrome 5 and later versions
- You have previously disabled autocomplete
- You have previously opted out of Google Instant
- You use a Google domain or interface language that does not yet support Google Instant
- In addition, users on particularly slow Internet connections won't see dynamic results since we want to make sure that your search experience is as fast as possible. Learn more about this and similar issues.
- Lastly, certain types of search queries that may be inappropriate will not trigger results to appear automatically. In these situations, you'll see a message asking you to click Enter to perform the search.
Although I personally love this feature, there might be users who do not like it and want to get rid of it. Don't worry. Just go to your Google Preferences Page and choose the "Do not use Google Instant" option. Your preference will be saved on a cookie and your choice will be saved until the cookie is cleared.
All in all, Google Instant is another great innovation by Google and it will surely change the way search is looked upon in near future. For any other queries/information about this feature you can visit the official Google Instant page.
