Google Instant, which the company unveiled Wednesday, is a fundamental shift: instead of search as an outcome, Google is trying to get people to think of search as a process in which you constantly refine your query without actually “searching,” or hitting the button to produce a concrete result.
Google is betting that in a world of nearly instant communication that search is going to have produce an answer just as fast as updates are spat out from Twitter or other real-time Web services. It’s a bit chaotic at first and will certainly throw a few searchers off their game as well as make those in the search-engine optimization game a little anxious.
