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Google's answer to the hunt-and-peck

Google "instant" is coming.

In fact, if you live outside of NZ, chances are it's already here.

Apparently, according to Google themselves, it will save on average as much as 2-5 seconds per search.

Woohoo... be still my beating heart!

As the old guy in this video says: "I didn't even have to press enter".

Hmmm... am I just an old cynic or is Google really grasping at straws to draw a point of distinction with other search engines such as Microsoft's Bing?

On their product page for instant search, Google claim, in the FAQ section, that it won't slow your internet connection.

Based on the video it would appear that it is constantly drawing down new data to refresh the page after each keystroke - that's got to have an effect on those who are on slower or shared connections.

Perhaps the coolest quote from that webpage is this one:

"If everyone uses Google Instant globally, we estimate this will save more than 3.5 billion seconds a day. That’s 11 hours saved every second"

Kind of sounds like perpetual motion doesn't it -- saving 11 hours every second.

Of course it's really unfair to judge the service without having some hands-on and hopefully we here in Godzone will get our hands-on real-soon-now. It's also good to see that "instant search" is only an option. The good old "hit enter to search" system will remain.

I have to say that after reading this:

"Before Google Instant, the typical searcher took more than 9 seconds to enter a search term, and we saw many examples of searches that took 30-90 seconds to type"

I'm feeling rather proud of my typing skills.

My average Google search query takes less than 5 seconds to enter -- and that's a long one. Perhaps instant search will be a valuable tool for those who can't type at 150 wpm like myself. It could be a real godsend for the hunt-and-peck keyboard users out there.

Which actually causes me to change topic a little...

Are you a hunt-and-peck, a touch-typist, or somewhere in between?

When I first started in this computer game, it would sometimes take me an eternity to track down some of the less-often used keys on a full qwerty keyboard. I was pretty damned good with 0-9 and A-F because a lot of my use involved entering hex-digits -- but when it came to typing in English prose, I was lost. That was probably just as well because back in the late 1970s, few microprocessor-based systems actually offered n-key rollover so fast typists would immediately be ankle-tapped anyway.

During the early 1980s I did tech myself to touch-type and that's one of the skills I think has been most important to me in the 30 years since.

Now I suspect that most kids coming out of school these days will be pretty keyboard-literate and I guess many will also be touch-typists (is this the case?). If so, Google's instant search is probably a tool that will appeal most to the non-Net generation who still have just one "typing finger" and spend a lot of time going "ahhhh.... umm... gotcha!" while searching for keys.

The interesting thing is that being able to touch-type may be a skill that will, over the next 30 years, fade from the radar. An increasing reliance on mousing, touch-screens, gestures and voice as the human/machine interface will likely mean that the average "user" will have little to gain from touch-typing skills.

So... today's questions:

How do you rate your typing skills? Can you touch-type? Are you just a fast hunt-and-peck? Or is Google's instant search going to be a godsend for you?

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