Other submissions on the same subject:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672391" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672391</a> <- This has <i>lots</i> of comments<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672388" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672388</a> <- This is an explanation<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672346" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672346</a> <- First
I have mixed feelings about this.<p>On the one hand I feel this is kind of "rude" and distracting. By "rude" I mean that I haven't finished typing and the page isn't waiting for its turn to interject.<p>On the other, this is just the logical extension of autocomplete on a search form. Even on a mobile phone, we already have this kind of predictive text functionality.<p>I guess we'll see with usage. For the most part though, I use FF's built-in search box, so I won't get to test it much.
The real question for me is whether I'll ever see this behavior. Other than the occasional image search, I do basically <i>all</i> my searching via the Chrome tab-complete search functionality.<p>I'm sure I'm in the minority of Google users, and those of use exclusively using the Chrome/FF/Safari/IE (such as it is) address bar searches are not numerous enough to impact the success of this initiative, but still. I also wonder if it will be good enough to drive any of us <i>away</i> from from the address bar search functionality.
I don't really see the benefit here. I understand it may save 2-5 seconds per search, but it's not as if though those 2-5 seconds are improving my experience any.<p>Assuming the time saved was important, they should've just implemented an AJAX search instead: type, press enter, dynamic load without page refresh. That's the real time killer. Having the results change while I'm typing is actually kind of annoying.