Have you noticed a change in how Google Search pulls up search right away and tries to give you what you are looking for before you can finish typing? If you have been wondering what its all about and why, or if you just want to turn it off, then you have come to the right place…
About a month ago..
Google Instant was released. Instant is a new way to search. One of Google’s goals was to make user’s searches faster. The key features of Instant are Dynamic results, predictions, and scroll to search. In theory this is great idea and I liked in the beginning. But now I find it a bit annoying especially with Google blacklisting certain words or words that SHOULD be black listed. Trust me, looking up certain keywords, might bring up site listings that are not safe for work.
As of today, my wife will have this feature turned off as she requested. For her, Instant doesn’t work so well. At work she is constantly doing safe (work friendly searches ) for business related stuff and half the time all of her search words are blacklisted, Like her and many others, they found it hard to want to keep Instant as their default search tool. Maybe in the future, Google will adjust how Instant works. If they do, more will use it.
Is it really helping?
Some will say it will help build page views for your site or we will get more traffic to our site because it will start showing up in more searches. These kinds of page views and drop in guests are not really here to see our sites. They stumbled across it during a search for something else. All they do is click on the link and then hit the back button if it is not what they want. All it does is fluff up our web site traffic stats and kill our bounce rate.
Some love it and others hate it. Is Google Instant here to stay? We will just have to wait and see. Check out this cool commercial created using one of Bob Dylan’s music videos to a demo of how well Google Instant works. It’s a great video and l love the song.
Check it out and decide for yourself if you want to keep it.
How To Disable Google Instant
If you want to disable Google Instant and use the old search style, its easy to do. You do not even need a Google account to turn it off.
To disable Google instant go to Google.com > Search Settings (top right) > Google Instant Preferences > Select Do not use Google Instant .
For those that have an account and want to keep Instant, you can remove certain search phrases from the results. Or you could disable history on Google (yes by default saves your search results and history) and then you wouldn’t have personalized results.
Final Thoughts
I like the idea and at first I liked how it found searches fasters. But now it brings ups to much junk and they blackout to many useful search words to make the tool not very useful for me. But most of the time it works ok. But will probably turn it off in the future..
Image Source: Iconfinder