Tech blogs are heavy with speculation over what Google will announce at a press conference it scheduled at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art this morning. But I don’t have to speculate—when I logged on to Google.com last night, I got something completely different.
As I began to type in my search term, the screen instantly flipped over to Google’s familiar results page, and little blue links filled the screen. Incredibly, the results changed as I typed. For instance, if I type in SL, the page shows me several results for Slickdeals.net. But as I continue typing—SLATE—the links below the search box begin to update in real time. You don’t have to press Enter when you’re done with your term; by the time you’re done typing, Google already knows what you want.
To see what I mean, watch this shaky video of my screen as I type into the Google box:
I’m not sure why I’ve been blessed with early access to Google’s live updating (when I asked people on Twitter, nearly no one was seeing this yet). I haven’t played around with it enough to tell you if live updating is truly useful, but it is certainly a feat of engineering. Just a few years ago, it seemed amazing that search engines could scan the entire Web and present us the best result in less than a second. Now Google can do it quicker than you can type. That’s something.
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