When Google launched “Instant Search” earlier today, commentators applauded and/or criticized the way Google predicts what you’re searching for.
If you haven’t seen Instant Search yet, see Google’s announcement or watch a video.
In a nutshell, when you start typing in the search box, a drop-down list appears suggesting possible completions. What’s new and actually quite exciting about Instant Search is that the results page for the topmost completion is automatically displayed in the background. You don’t even have to click the Search button.
So, when I type “p”, the topmost suggested completion is “pandora”. While I’m typing, the search results for “pandora” are displayed, just as if I had pressed Return.
When I type “py”, the topmost suggested completion changes to “python” and the search results for that are displayed.
I can see how this is helpful, and I like this change a lot. (I don’t care about increased data traffic right now.)
One commentator, Jeff Jarvis tweeted this:
One-letter instant search presumptions appear to be both local and personalized (they know what I’ve looked for).
And this:
Took only an hour: What does Instant Search mean to privacy? )Nothing it didn’t mean yesterday.) http://zd.net/aapmQm
Well, duh, yes. The predictions in Instant Search seem to work exactly the way they worked before. It’s just that the suggestions were merely listed in a drop-down list before, and now the search results page is shown in real-time.
I did a quick test to find out whether I can see differences in the prediction algorithm. Here is the same search for “pyt” performed once while being logged-in with Instant Search enabled and once while being logged-out:
Without Instant Search:
With Instant Search:
The predictions are exactly the same. If Google had taken all its knowledge about me into account, it wouldn’t offer “pandora” or “petco”. It doesn’t even seem to take the country of my IP address into account (which frankly surprises me), let alone my previous searches.
So, if you have privacy concerns about Google’s search, Instant Search shouldn’t change a thing.
