SAN FRANCISCO
Google Inc. stepped on its Internet-search accelerator yesterday by adding a feature that displays results as soon as people begin typing their requests.
The change, called "Google Instant," is the closest yet that the 12-year-old company has come to realizing its founders' ambition to build a search engine that reads its users' minds.
The achievement wasn't lost on Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who jokingly told reporters that the company's lightning-quick computers are morphing into the "other third" of people's brains.
"I think it's a little bit of a new dawn in computing," Brin said.
The shift means that Google users will begin to see an ever-evolving set of search results appearing on their computer screens, potentially changing with each additional character typed.
That means that a satisfactory set of results could take just one keystroke. As an example, a person who types "w" in Google's search box could see the weather results in the same area as where the request was entered.
Google will also try to predict what a person really wants by filling out the anticipated search terms in gray letters. Below that, in a drop-down box, Google will still offer other suggested search requests, as it has for the past two years.
The feature will be gradually rolled out throughout the United States this week and will be offered in other parts of the world later this year. It is designed to work on the latest versions of the major Web browsers.
The instant results will be displayed only on Google's standard website, which features little more than its logo and a search box. They won't be shown to users making requests on individually designed "iGoogle" pages that are usually already covered with different decorations and programs plugged into other online services.
People who prefer Google's basic website and don't want to see instant results can turn them off by clicking on a link next to the search box.
To minimize the chances of offending people or inadvertently exposing children to inappropriate material, Google has programmed the instant results to block websites deemed to be pornographic, violent or hateful.
Because Google's search formula draws heavily upon common search requests, the instant results also could be biased toward featuring major brands and companies during the first few characters of a request.
That factor conceivably could hurt smaller merchants if people stop typing after the first few keystrokes and accept the results that show up the most quickly.
Google search executive Marissa Mayer hailed the instant-search breakthrough as a quantum leap. "It's a fundamental shift to search and how people think of search," she said.
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