This week Google announced the introduction of Instant which is a definite revolution in the way we search. Integrating things like prediction, dynamic results, and scroll to search, Google Instant will shave some serious user hours off search. However, it doesn’t seem to be a very new concept. In fact, it seems that last year Bing’s search engine was tweaked to produce Real Live Search, which loaded full results pages as users typed.
Chinese native turned Australian transplant, Long Zheng developed the app in just a few hours he said to Tech Crunch last year, and it seems that Microsoft is excited about this feature still; even though Google Instant generated a lot of buzz and most people weren’t even aware that Real Live Search existed.
Stefan Weitz, Bing’s director, did a Technology Live interview with USA Today were he talks about how Bing is trying to do search smarter, and that faster doesn’t always equal smarter. Weitz explains that it’s a good thing to produce search results quickly, but that doesn’t always mean it is going to be the type of results that users are looking for thus not really saving them any time.
He also says that combining with Yahoo is helping them not only gain access to more information, but with the increase of information Bing can bring users more relevant results faster. “When you think about state-of-the-art searching, it should be less about searching and more about finding” says Weitz.
