This afternoon I read a post over on How-To Geek about enabling Google Instant Search in Google Chrome. This appealed to me as I am in a long formed habit of conducting my initial searches from the address bar of the browser.
In most cases my method would be:
- press “Ctrl+T” on the keyboard to create a new tab;
- start typing search term – the cursor is already focussed in the address bar on creating a new tab; and
- hit enter and view the result.
The launch of Google Instant Search has, for the first time in years, challenged my tried and tested behaviour for searching. Yet, whilst the idea is that it speeds up your searching, I haven’t necessarily found this to be true. If I wanted to utilise the new search feature I’d need to:
- launch new tab;
- go to google.com;
- type my search term; and
- view the result.
There’s an extra step in there now, making it somewhat less ‘instant’. 1
Enter How-To Geek’s little tip for enabling Instant search directly from the Chrome address bar. One small switch added and huzzah, we’ve got Instant Search in a new tab straight away. It’s a little glitchy at the moment as it’s early days for it, but then there’s a few things with Instant Search that I think need addressing.
However, thanks to Instant Search and a couple of typos I came across something I’d never seen happen on Google.com before. I was looking for something relating to email-standards.org, and my fingers were being a little stubborn in typing the correct term, so there was ample use of backspace and further typing. All of a sudden Google presented me with the following page:
Apparently I was so instant that I was deemed to be a computer sending automated requests! I don’t really think I was typing that quickly either.
Of course it could be something funny relating to running a test version of Chrome, but I’m not sure how I’d find that out.
- Ok, I know if I had google.com setup to be my home page I wouldn’t have the extra step ↩
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