Google Instant has been unveiled; Google’s new product that speeds up searches so that results are displayed as soon as you type in a letter. But don’t use it if you’re looking for porn!
Previously, Google would display suggestions for searches as soon as you typed in the first letter, but results wouldn’t appear until you hit Enter or Search. With Instant, results appear as you type.
So, for instance, if you type in ‘w’, Google Instant predicts that you are checking out whether Bestival will be ruined by the rain, and gives you weather results.
A post on the official Google Blog describes Google Instant:
“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.
“The user benefits of Google Instant are many — but the primary one is time saved. Our testing has shown that Google Instant saves the average searcher two to five seconds per search.
“That may not seem like a lot at first, but it adds up. With Google Instant, we estimate that we’ll save our users 11 hours with each passing second!”
However, Google has blacklisted certain terms from its Instant searches.
“We care a lot about child safety and these kinds of issues, so we had to think a lot about auto-complete and how that works as you’re getting the results,” said Google product manager Johanna Wright.
“We apply the same policies that we always have, whereby we filter for violence, hate, and pornography. As a result, if you’re typing for something that may not be appropriate for certain people to see, you won’t see results until you press enter.”
Indeeed, Instant acts touchingly naïve when you do a search for, ‘por..’, for example.
‘Portal’? Er, yeah, that’s what we were after…
