Yesterday, Google had replaced their logo on their homepage with a series of bouncing balls and because the logo didn’t actually link to any specific search results, it led to the question of whether the search engine was planning some kind of announcement.

Well, that speculation can be put to rest as today we have a Google announcement. Today, Google has revealed Google Instant which provides a “streaming version of its search engine” that refines it search results in “real-time” as you enter in your search query. The announcement was made by Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of search products and user experience.

To put it simply, Google has expanded the role of its Suggest Tool. Instead of providing suggested search queries as you type, Google will now offer up full pages of results as you type. The reason for this change boils down to speed, both in terms of faster search results and getting users to the content that they are looking for a little faster.

The new service was demoed earlier today with a Google Engineer typing just the letter W into the search box. This immediately brought up “weather” type results, anticipating that this is what you were wanting to search for. If you had just typed the letter W and pressed enter or clicked on the search box, you would have received results for only that character.

Google Instant Search will be available in the US today and France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Russia and the UK will have access to it within the week. To use the service, you will need to have a compatible Internet browser with supported browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer 8 and Safari.

Plans are also underway to expand this new service onto mobile phones and we should this this by the fall.

Via: The Register