Google Instant Announced

GCPSoft writes with this quote from a Google announcement: "Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type."

Comments

It's live now, and

[ultraexactzz]

...it scared the hell out of our secretary about 10 minutes ago. "How does it know?!?" she said. I guess it found her city with just "city" in the box - pretty impressive, I thought.

Re:You know what would make it instant?

[DeadDecoy]

Just tried it out and holy jeebus is it fast. My only qualm however is that, when I know what I'm looking for, it's a little distracting watching all of the results flash by as I type. Almost seizure inducing. It's very cool, but it would be nice if I could control the refresh rate with finer granularity.
On another note, a quick refresh rate can pull up some non-professional images if one isn't careful. For instance in typing latent dirichlet, 'la' pulled up a partially clothed/nude image of lady gaga.This might have been a bit awkward if safe-search wasn't on.

Re:Ad revenue driver?

[clarkkent09]

Talking about ad revenue, where do those suggestions come from? I typed "s" and the first three suggestions I got: skype, staples, sears. "e" - ebay, espn, expedia. "m" - myspace, mapquest, msn. Randomly tried typing two letters: "be" - best buy, bed bath and beyond, bevmo. etc.

Wouldn't some common word or a name of a pop star or whatever be the most likely thing people will search for rather than almost exclusively company names? Weird.