{"id":4540,"date":"2010-09-09T07:37:03","date_gmt":"2010-09-09T14:37:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/palblog.fxpal.com\/?p=4540"},"modified":"2010-09-08T22:10:25","modified_gmt":"2010-09-09T05:10:25","slug":"instant-success","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.fxpal.net\/?p=4540","title":{"rendered":"Instant success?"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I fired up IE-8<\/a> and I tried Google Instant. It’s fast: as fast as I can type, it’s showing me search results. Mind you the results aren’t always sensible, but they are delivered quickly. It works great for short queries such as looking for a popular sense of some word. In this case, it saves me the trouble of hitting enter. Nice, but not earth-shattering.<\/p>\n

When I am looking for something less obvious, it guesses wrong. For example, the query “information processing and management” (an academic journal) first produced a set of results for the partial string “”inform” that match informatica.com. Nice, but not the journal. After I typed “information,” it showed me the wikipedia page for “information” (oh the irony) and a bunch of other links highly-associated with the term. But no journal. “information proc” produced a bunch of hits on “information processing.” Better, but not what I am after. Completing the second word and pressing the space bar yielded a number of links to “information processing theory,” which also happens to be the top query suggestion. But no journal. Only when I typed “information processing and” did I get the results I wanted.<\/p>\n

So what are we to make of this new addition to Google’s bag of tricks?<\/p>\n

It’s a slick interface that has been referred to as truly interactive. The problem is that the word ‘interactive’ has several meanings, and that can lead to some confusion. There are two important meanings in this context:<\/p>\n