Amit Singhal, Google’s head of search ranking, announces Instant Search at an event in San Francisco
Googles Instant Pages
“Google is ready to make waiting for Web pages to load a thing of the past—at least for those pages found using its search engine and the company’s Chrome browser. As a user peruses the list of results returned in response to a query, the browser will fetch and load in the background the page it considers most relevant. If a person does click that result, the page will load instantaneously.” src – technology review
What’s Special about this?
Firefox has had prefetch for a long time now. It was damn annoying. If you had a slow connection or limited bandwidth this could become very expensive.
I disabled prefetch a long time ago because it was detrimental to my surfing.
Rarely is google so good that the first result is the one you want. Therefore it will often be fetching something you don’t need. This smacks of an apple/microsoft like announcement. More marketing than truth.
If you believe google is so good then just click I am feeling lucky. which send you to the first website in the search results.
SEO (search engine optimisation)
From SEO point of view it means a site would get inflated hit figures for hits they never actually received because the user decided to click the second or subsequent link
Malicious Sites
Malicious sites could conceivably give you a virus even though you look at the result and think “Hey I ain’t going there it looks suss to me”
Cookies and Privacy
When google and Firefox combined in the past to do this I was tipped off by sites requesting to place cookies on my machine. even though I never visited the sites. I never accept third party cookies, to me this was an invasion of privacy, Hence the main reason I disabled it.
Dumb move Google and even dumber announcement. it so smacks of Steve Jobs*. Was he hired as a consultant on this?
* In case you didn’t realise it this article was written before Steve Jobs passed away