We’re about to get started, folks. Please keep all hands, feet and other bodily parts inside the vehicle.
If you’re not sure what’s going on, then just check here and here.
Or watch this video:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty71OxyQKKc]
Gabriel Stricker from Google comms is now on stage making sure folks can connect to the Wi-Fi network.
Refresh for live updates, folks.
Today’s event is a ‘state of union’ for Google.
Science and art on tap for today. The event is taking place at the SF MOMA.
Today is about ‘fast’.
Marissa Mayer is now on stage.
Google has over 1 billion users a week.
More than 500 changes to UI and ranking have been rolled out for Google Search in 2010.
Changes have been made to spell correction and how to handle proper nouns.
Mayer is just going over what Google has done over the last year.
“Fundamental shift in search.”
Mayer is rattling off facts about Henri Matisse’s ‘Woman in a hat’ and how to find facts about it in a faster way.
It takes about 9 seconds for users to enter their query.
Google is focusing on making the 300ms of serving time faster.
Google Instant!
Mayer is going through a demo of Google Instant now. If you watch the video above, you’ll get a sense of how Instant works.
As you type your query you often times get results for other things that you might not be searching for, right? With Google Instant, search results are instantly served up as you tap down through the different predictions.
Google Instant will be rolled out later today on Chrome, Firefox, Safari and IE8.
2 to 5 seconds will be shaved off search with Instant. 11 hours can be saved for each passing second.
Here are a few of the core features in Google Instant:
• Dynamic Results – Google dynamically displays relevant search results as you type so you can quickly interact and click through to the web content you need.
• Predictions – One of the key technologies in Google Instant is that we predict the rest of your query (in light gray text) before you finish typing. See what you need? Stop typing, look down and find what you’re looking for.
• Scroll to search – Scroll through predictions and see results instantly for each as you arrow down.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElubRNRIUg4]
Google Instant will be rolled out to users in France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain and the U.K. this month.
Google Instant appears to be live on the east coast.
Caveat: you must be signed in to see Instant in action.
Doesn’t look like Instant works in the address bar in Chrome.
“To bring Google Instant to life, we needed a host of new technologies including new caching systems, the ability to adaptively control the rate at which we show results pages and an optimization of page-rendering JavaScript to help web browsers keep up with the rest of the system. In the end, we needed to produce a system that was able to scale while searching as fast as people can type and think—all while maintaining the relevance and simplicity people expect from Google.”
Instant was just demoed on Motorola Droid. Looks like the demos are all done.