We all know that Google has been interested in developing new products and capabilities and, by the same token, willing to cull products when they haven’t hit the mark.
Google Instant is a new feature augmenting its popular search. Basically, it allows you to see your search results as your are typing your keywords and provides you with the opportunity to finetune your results on the fly without having to refresh the page. This is a prime use of AJAX (Asychronous JavaScript and XML) where parts of a webpage can be updated without having to reload the entire page.
Google is claiming a number of time efficiencies as a result of using this technology, at the most fundamental it is claiming a saving of two to five seconds per search and at least 3.5 billion seconds a day if everyone used it (which is eleven hours saved per elapsed second).
The benefit of this technology is more useful when longer search terms are required to narrow down results. If you could find the content you require after typing only half as much as you were to expect then this could be something of interest to you. Also, results will be filtered according to your SafeSearch preferences so with the default settings you should be reasonably safe in not unearthing potentially objectionable material.
In order to use Google Instant, you’ll need one of the following browsers (strangely, Opera is not listed but I assume it should work):
- Chrome 5 or higher,
- Firefox 3 or higher,
- Internet Explorer 8 or higher, or
- Safari 5.
Finally, Google Instant is only available here for the time being (and you will need to be signed into your Google account) but will be rolled out progressively to other countries over time.
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