Life's Too Short for Instant Search

GOOGLE has recently rolled out their very own instant search, branded Google Instant, for most signed-in users. The cool thing about it is that it can potentially save a lot of time for people all over the world. All this time adds up--every time a behemoth like Google shaves a few seconds off the time it takes people to use it, it's probably saving many years and millions of dollars of aggregated time and money the world over, thanks to the sheer number of people using it all the time.

Sounds nice, so I was pretty benign about the new technology, which shows you results while you type your search--until I saw that it insisted on showing me only 10 results at a time. No matter how many times I went to the preferences (Search settings on top right corner) and changed it back to 100 results, it always went back to 10.

So I turned it off (option available also in Search settings). In my opinion the instant search is not worth the trade-off of clicking through many pages of results, if I'm looking for something that's hard to find. I mean sure, Google is good, but it happens to me all the time that I have to do quite a bit of searching and sifting through the results before I find what I'm looking for.

Who knows, maybe in the future they'll improve it to the point that they'll be able to show a thousand instant results even before I've typed my search query. But until that happens, Instant Search stays off for me.