Google Instant Will Save 350 Million Hours Of User Time Per Year

Here at the Google Search Event in San Francisco, Google engineer Ben Gomes brought up the fact that the search engine serves up billions of queries every day, the average query length being 20 characters and the average time for a user to pick a result being 15 seconds.

“There are billions of queries and tens of billions of documents, getting people from the right query to the right document is fun,” said Gomes.

Google’s latest feature launch is all about speeding up this process. Says Google’s Marissa Mayer,
“Google Instant will save 350 million hours of user time, over a year,” basing her rough estimate on a figure of each instant search saving two to five seconds of user time, in places where Google Instant is rolled out.

When asked about plans to improve speed Gomes replied, “Tomorrow we try to find ways to make it even faster. That’s what we’ve always done. You ain’t seen nothing yet.”