Google Instant Search

Poor old Microsoft Bing.
They spend a fortune marketing, improving and building up their search engine.
They try to convince mr and mrs public that their search is quick, clean and more importantly relevant when returning results the number of users begins to slowly rise again and then BANG! Mr Google from across the street releases Google Instant Search.

I pride myself on not being a geeky developer or blogger (perhaps thats a contradiction of terms though!) but when I saw Google instant search in action yesterday for the first time, I found myself saying to my wife "Look at this it's really damn impressive".

She looked at me and said "What? It's just searching for stuff, isn't it supposed to do that?"

It was at that stage I realised how for granted we take technology these days.

When I heard about instant search I was scepticle about how instant it would actually be, expecting a fair bit of lag but I have to admit Instant search is. . . . . well it's pretty instant.

For those of you that have not tried it yet, it returns and amends results as you type.

So if for example I start typing my name and from the very first letter I get a list of results, it updates pretty much as quickly as I can type until I find the correct results.

This could save up to 350 million hours annually based on googles weekly users of approx 1 billion!

To protect children and other sensitive people google instant search will also block any sites the are deemed violent, hateful or porngraphic.

Google at present handle about two thirds of all internet search results, microsoft and yahoo handle a majority of the rest and with this huge jump google are likely to mop up more of that in coming months.

How will Bing and Yahoo respond? I really don't know. But respond they must and to save their own skins it best be quick in fact in better be instant!