Google, which can already feel like an appendage to our brains, is now predicting what people are thinking before they even type. On Wednesday, Google introduced Google Instant, which predicts Internet search queries and shows results as soon as someone begins to type, adjusting the results as each successive letter is typed.
“We want to make Google the third half of your brain,” said Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder and president of technology, speaking at a Google press event at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president for search products and user experience, added, “There’s even a psychic element to it.”
Google’s new psychic powers result in much faster searches, but the change might affect the many businesses that have been built around placing search ads on Google and helping Web sites figure out how to climb higher in search results to increase revenue.
It is a sign that even as Google expands into other businesses, like display advertising and cellphones, it remains firmly focused on search, its core business and one that accounts for more than 90 percent of its revenue. It has faced competition recently from Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
Google has made its new product the default way to search the Web. Instant works with the most popular modern browsers in the United States and several other countries. It will show up on cellphones and in browser search bars in a few months.
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.
