Google Instant has been out for a while now. You may have noticed already, in a positive or negative way. You start typing in your search in Google, and before pressing ‘Enter’, Google doesn’t only auto-suggest entries for you, but shows you the search results that would come back to you, if you were to press ‘Enter’.
Now, Google has introduced a beta version of Google Instant to most iPhone and Android devices in the U.S. And after seeing this video trailer of it in use, Google Instant finally makes sense to me. Because typing on a touchscreen mobile device is a much much slower process, at least currently, than a full-size QWERTY keyboard on your desktop. So having Google try to guess where I’m going and let me get there quicker can save a mobile user a significant amount of search time.
Whether or not desktop users will ever appreciate the minuscule time benefits of Google Instant is yet to be seen.