I'm amazed that users couldn't tell the qualitative difference between submitting a form and find-as-you-type. To a hacker, AJAX is a whole other experience but to Joe User, it's just a bit faster. It's something to keep in mind if your AJAX interface <i>isn't</i> actually faster.<p>Yet another unconscious programmer assumption shattered.
Google Instant is shockingly fast. It is hard to imagine a small startup creating it and having it work for a few beta users. Even harder to imagine Google scaling up their infrastructure 10-fold.
I would have loved to be a fly on the wall at Microsoft when someone said - 'That's weird, have you tried google today?'<p>I assume some of the ajaxy Google logos have been leading up to this - especially the one that coloured in the letters as you typed.
I think the most interesting piece of that article is that they are caching per user results. So not only have they made result display dynamic, but they've made the performance unique to everyone using the system.
They capture my keyboard after I search from the menu bar of Chrome, so I can't hit backspace to return to the previous page. Even if I click outside of the box, any Google search page redirects my backspace into the search box, which also changes the results.<p>It's rather quite annoying.
<i>In user studies, people quickly found a new way to interact with Google: type until the gray text matches your intention and then move your eyes to the results. We were actually surprised at how well this worked—most people in our studies didn’t even notice that anything had changed. Google was just faster.</i><p>If this is the case, then what's the point of showing the search results as the user types? It seems that just having predictions is sufficient.