The system starts returning results with the first letter you type — guessing what you will search for in order to get the results to you before you finish typing.

For example, starting a search on ‘S’ loads results for Skype, likely the most popular query starting with that word. As usual, you can see other suggestions below the search query box, and now additionally you see the word Google guessed for you in gray type ahead of what you’ve typed so far.

You can then accept that word by tabbing, or you can choose another suggestion by using the up or down. When you scroll through those, the results load, without you ever having to hit the return key.

“There is a psychic element because we can predict what you are about to search on in real time,” said Google vice president Marissa Mayer. She points out that the idea of Google being able to guess what you want before you finish typing was so far out 10 years ago that it was the company’s April Fool’s joke.

Mayer explains that it takes about 9 seconds to enter a search into Google. With Google Instant Mayer says they can shave about 2 to 5 seconds per search. The company estimates that if every one on the planet used Google Instant for their searches, it would save about 3.5 billion seconds a day, or 11 hours saved every second.

As the FAQ page explains: “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.”

Starting Wednesday, users running Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE8 in the U.S. will begin seeing the new results Wednesday. Google is also rolling out the service to users in the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Spain and Russia so long as they are signed-in. U.S. users do not need to be signed in.

A version of the streaming results will be available on mobile devices this fall, the company said.

Suggestions will not include words associated with pornography, violence or hate speech, and results can be filtered as previously using Google’s Safe Search settings.

The announcement was made Wednesday to a packed auditorium of tech writers in San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art — a tribute, Google said, to the art that accompanies its tech.

Google also announced that it now has over one billion users per week.

The update is a big change for the search giant, which used to pride itself on how little time it took its lightweight homepage to load.

While the new update adds little in the way of words or clutter, it’s reliance on JavaScript (which also has to load with the home page) shows the search giant thinks that there’s more to a great search engine than relevant results and initial page load speed. The company also says that it will automatically turn off the instant search when a user is on a slow connection.

More to come as the event unfolds.

Follow us for disruptive tech news: Ryan Singel and Epicenter on Twitter.

See Also:

• Google Beefs Up Voice Search, Mobile Sync
• Google Poaches Social Search Service Aardvark
• Google to Offer Encrypted Search Next Week
• Picture This: Google Chases Bing
• Google Dings Bing With $700M Buy of Travel-Search Company

Authors: Ryan Singel

to know more click here