Steve Cote: Google Instant coming to Chrome address bar

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Google Instant coming to Chrome address bar

Search from within the browser

Google has announced that it is bringing its Google instant search functionality to its Chrome browser, allowing people to search the Internet straight from the address bar (called omnibox) instead of having to load Google.com.

The new feature will allow people to search pages even faster, claimed Google, while demoing search results in lightning speed. The browser starts to show results even after users have typed just one letter ("e" for ESPN, "t" for "Twitter", for example).?

The news comes as Google has announced that it has over 120m users of its Chrome browser around the globe, giving it, in some cases, 1 in 3 users in some countries.

“The single most common feedback from our users is that it’s fast”, said Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice president of Product Management, at an event on Tuesday in San Francisco.

Building on that speed element, Google demoed a number of features it hopes will make the browser even faster.

Google also demonstrated a new pdf reader, which works directly in the browser, as well as providing information on how the browser will add hardware acceleration. According to Google, the combination of all the new features, including a boosting technology called Crackshaft, means that the browser is around 50 times faster than Google Chrome was on launch 2 years ago.

Tags: Software Online Chrome Browsers Google