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We don't "need" it, but taking Google's stats at face value for the moment, it will save 350 million hours per year. That's not insignificant.

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Yea, but at what cost? Are they using more power? I would think so as they not only auto-complete, but also generate countless search results in rapid-fire mode.

For every query, how many more sets of results are returned? On average, it's easily more than one. It's only one when they predict your query.

If people like this and it makes search more server-intensive to run, that works in Google's favor by making it more expensive to compete with them on instant search. They're the champions when it comes to infrastructure, and they know it.

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