Search: now faster than the speed of type

Other submissions on the same subject:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672391 <- This has lots of comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672388 <- This is an explanation

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672346 <- First

I have mixed feelings about this.

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.

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.

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 all my searching via the Chrome tab-complete search functionality.

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 away 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.

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.

Well, imagine a kid trying to search for sextant!

Does anyone really thinks Google is too slow?