Google Instant Is Anything But a Time-Saver

I, on the contrary, trust Google here.<p>They're known for their extensive testing. I highly highly doubt that they would make such a major change to their main page without knowing <i>for sure</i> that it would be for the better.

The only thing that i care about is that it helps a lot for doing incremental searches, e.g. if you are searching for someone, you can add keywords like their occupation, university expertise and it works really well.<p>most of the ppl crying over this are doing this because now there SEO is all messed up and people can look for things that they want much more efficiently. Consider so many people who rather looked at results that they got rather than modifying their searches. also people will choose top 5-6 results, so if your results are not in top 5-6 they are worth much less.<p>All this talk is nothing but google hate. if you just dont want to use this feature press enter every time you type.

I have two problems with it<p>1) It makes search slower on my slow netbook (all these DOM operations aren't free, you know). So while I type some long phrase, Google does all these meaningless searches (that I don't even look at), and slows down the browser tremendously. (I use Chrome on the netbook).<p>2) I cannot turn it off. I tried. I went to "Search settings", selected "Do not use Google Instant", saved the settings. It's still on. When I go to settings again, "Use Google Instant" is still checked.

Actually... I think they may be right. Though I have my own theories as to why:<p>More results = more time <i>reading</i> results, = more ad impressions. If you hit two letters and it seems to have decent results, you're probably going to look to see if it <i>is</i> what you wanted, rather than finishing your search term. Good for Google's income.<p>In addition, on the other side of the equation: if you don't know <i>exactly</i> what you're finding, more results more quickly means you're more likely to find exactly what you were looking for... which is good for Google, because you'll come back, and good for <i>you</i>, because you found what you wanted.<p>More time is more time, but I typically visit Google for all of 5 seconds. Having it take 10 seconds to find better results (and in a few wide-ranging searches, I <i>definitely</i> got better results due to the immediate feedback) is worth it to me.

1) Who searches on "sausage" or "Sausalito"? I might search for 'sausage making quote' or 'Sausalito italian restaurant'. And while I type that I get faded type ahead in my search box and results popping up on the screen. Annoying.<p>2) As long as I'm criticizing, I also use quotes in about half my searches, but Google's type ahead feature strips them out rendering the function useless.<p>3) OK, a rave about Google's search tools...being able to search in past 24 hours, week, month, year, etc is wonderful when trying to find an answer to a specific technical problem.<p>But Instand? I turned it off within a couple hours. It's too distracting.

I hardly ever use the Google homepage to search anyway, I always use the address bar in Chrome so this new feature is largely irrelevant to me.