New York: On Wednesday, Google began introducing a major change to the way its search engine delivers results. Results now appear while you are still typing your search query. If you keep typing, Google’s results change to match.
Called Google Instant, it is the default search for all desktop and laptop users who go to google.com on the most popular browsers — Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Google’s own Chrome. (As of this moment, I am using Instant on Chrome, Firefox and Safari. It has not yet appeared in my Internet Explorer 8 browser. A Google spokesman, Nate Tyler, said it should appear soon. (Google instant: Now a new accelerated search)
Google Instant, which you can read about on Google’s Web site and also on the company’s blog, is very self-explanatory, except for three issues.
First, as you type, Google delivers the search results for the most likely completion of your search terms. It also pops up a list of five most likely completions for your search. If you want to scroll through the instant results for those alternate completions, don’t click on them with your mouse. Instead, use the arrow keys on your computer’s keyboard to hop down and up through them. If you instead click on one of the alternate completions, Google will make the rest of the list go away and show you the results for that one term.
Second, if you reach Google through a browser toolbar or through the Chrome browser’s omnibar, Google Instant will not yet work for you. To get the Instant results, go to Google.com and use that instead. (It also is not ready for mobile phones yet, the company said.)
Third, if you really hate it, here’s how to turn it off: If your browser has Google Instant enabled, go to the google.com homepage and look to the right of the search box. You should see a link in tiny blue type: “Instant is on.” Click that, and up pops a menu to turn Google Instant on or off, as well as another option to learn more about the feature.
Google Instant uses much less Internet bandwidth than you might think, because its proposed search results are optimized to take up very little data space compared with even a small photo. Also, if you have configured Google to deliver more than 10 search results per page, the Instant feature will set your results count back to 10. If you prefer to read through long lists of results, turn Instant off.
Got a question about how to use Google Instant? Post it in the comments below, and I’ll try to get an answer.