Google Instant Search Displays Full, Real-Time Results As You Type

Google’s newest search tool, unveiled today, starts giving you results the instant you start typing. With Google Instant, the Internet overlords are taking search-engine prediction to a new level.

Sign in with your Google account and go to the main search page, and you’ll see it still looks the same. But start typing something — “Popular Science,” for instance — and Google brings up a page of instant results, which change as you keep typing. You don’t even have to type a full search term to find answers, because Google Suggest completes your thoughts for you.

Refining as you go allows for more effective searching — you can change topics mid-sentence if you don’t see what you’re looking for.

According to Google’s blog, developers realized that people read much faster than they type — they take about 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only about 30 milliseconds to glance at another part of the page.

Google Instant capitalizes on this, allowing you to scan a page full of search results even as you type.

There’s more coming from Google’s press conference today at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. You can get the real-time updates from CNET’s insta-blog.