Google has introduced instant search. It is being rolled out to the US today and should be available to France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain and the UK by the end of the week. It should roll out to the rest of the world over the next weeks or months according to Google. In order for Google instant search to work in Safari you have to be signed in to your Google account however in Google chrome it seems to work even if you are signed out. I can’t seem to get it to work in Firefox at all, not sure why and since I don’t use Firefox that often I am not really worried about it. However I am curious if anyone else was having trouble getting it too work in Firefox and has found a solution to the problem.
The way Google search worked yesterday is you would start typing in an inquiry such as Indian restaurants and after you had typed in Indian res you would see a list with the words Indian restaurants and the nearby cities and towns. You would then have to arrow down to the one you wanted, hit enter and then you would get the search results for Indian restaurants in that city. You then have to click on your choice to go to the page. If you think about you are looking at about four steps to get to the page you want. What instant search does is speed this process up. If instant search is turned on when you go to www.google.com and start typing Indian restaurant, you will notice as you are typing some grey letters start to appear as it tries to guess what you are searching for. If the grey letters are completing what you are looking for you can hit tab and it will give you that search result page. Then you can click on the result you want and go to the page. If instead of hitting tab you hit the down arrow you will notice the search page changes to match your choice once you hit the one you want if you hit the right arrow key, it will automatically take you to the first search entry on the page.
If you decide you don’t want to use Google instant search, but you still want to use Google to search ,you can turn off instant search two ways. The first one is to click on the arrow where it says instant search is on and then click on turn instant search off. The second way is to go into search settings and then scroll down to Google instant search and click on Do not use Google Instant, then make sure you save your preferences. If you are wondering how Google can guess what you are looking for so quickly it is using your web history and your ISP location. If you are uncomfortable about Google having this much information you can turn it off. To turn it off go to settings then My Account, and click on the edit button next to My product and then Remove Web History permanently. You will get a warning message and it will ask for your password. I recommend reading the Web History FAQ before you decide to delete your web history permanently, so you are aware of the consequences. Google instant search uses the same information that regular google search did, it just does it faster. I am not sure how much I will use it since I use Google Chrome and use the address bar to do most of my setting. What do you think of Google instant search, do you like it or not.
