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

Alexia Tsotsis

Alexia Tsotsis is the co-editor of TechCrunch. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the media industry. After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in... → Learn More

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

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.”

Company: Google
Website: google.com
Launch Date: September 7, 1998
IPO: NASDAQ:GOOG

Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Google+, the company’s extension into the social space. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing...

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