A NEW feature being rolled out by Google marks one of the biggest changes in years to its search engine technology. In addition to keyword suggestions, users will now be treated to instant search results based on their past queries and displayed as they type.

Normally you key in a keyword or phrase, press search and you are treated to a list of results. Some are spot on, some miss the mark. Google Instant (www.google.ie/ instant) aims to rule out time wasted on inaccurate results by adapting searches “on the fly”, says Jonathan Effrat, Google product manager.

With 84.73 per cent of the global search engine market captured, according to the latest figures from netmarketshare.com, and serving more than a billion searches a day, Google reckons Instant will meet the increased demand it is seeing.

This may seem counterintuitive because each time a user types a letter, Google begins guessing and suggesting links, so many more result pages are shown for every query performed. It is, however, designed to get the user to where they want to go faster by scanning possible results as they type.

Google estimates Instant saves two to five seconds on each search, but, as Effrat says, “search is a hard problem that is far from solved”.

Steve Rubel, a senior vice-president with Edelman Digital, claims that Google Instant will kill search engine optimisation – the various methods used by websites to improve visibility in search engine results. “Google Instant means no one will see the same web any more, making optimising it virtually impossible,” he said on his blog.

More importantly, instead of sorting through results, Instant is trying to serve it to us on a platter, making us a little bit more dependent on the powerhouse that is Google.