by Rachelle de Bretagne

Created on: September 10, 2010

If you don't already know what Google Instant is, chances are you don't use Google, though you should. A cleverly innovative addition to the Google tools, Google Instant may seem a little strange the first time you use it. As soon as you start to search your subject on Google.com's home page, you will instantly see that Google's software is already searching for what you may be looking for. It saves you time as often the search achieves results faster than traditional searches.

Google have cleverly added this software to help searchers to save time, and if you add up the number of searches done daily, this can actually improve productivity. It's a little disconcerting to use at first as the page seems to think faster than you do. A startling experience the first time, you actually get accustomed to the search doing the work for you and even playing with searches to see how accurately Google pinpoint that topic you are looking for.

Using predictive software, the search is fun to use, though can seem irksome at first, since as soon as you want to refine your search and take words out of the search box, the screen goes blank waiting for your next search. For those who enjoy keeping that info on the page so they can see the pages already accessed, this is annoying. Can you turn it off? Truth is that you can because beside the search box is a neat activation and dis-activation button which allows you to choose the kind of search you want to. Chances are though that once you get accustomed to using it, you won't.

Accessing the previous page is simple. By pressing the “back” button on the browser, your older search comes back intact, so you haven't really lost functionality at all.

What Google Instant does is make users more careful with their search words and that can't be a bad thing. Careful searches always bring up better results, but anticipated searches from users who are reasonable at spelling and clues come up very fast indeed on your browser page.

What would be fun would be to see Google Instant incorporated into the image library, though this appears not to be the case for the time being. Switching from one to the other seems to slow down the whole process of search, so much so that you actually can compare the speed using both systems and see the speed of the search change.

Compatible with Firefox and Internet Explorer, it's interesting to see what people are saying about Google Instant. There are mixed messages at the current time, though

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