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Google Technology

Google Preps Instant Search For Chrome 8 128

Posted by CmdrTaco from the integration-proclamation dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Google is apparently playing with a nifty integration of instant search inside of its Chrome browser. Typing in the URL bar will automatically bring up a search page, while URLs apparently can be completed much faster as well. It seems as if Google isn't running out of ideas for its browser anytime soon."
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Google Preps Instant Search For Chrome 8 More

Google Preps Instant Search For Chrome 8

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  • I hope there's a way to turn this off (Score:3, Insightful)

    by iONiUM ( 530420 ) on Tuesday September 21, 2010 @02:08PM (#33654092) Journal

    I would be worried, as I use Chrome at work, about searching for "po"..."st office". I mean, that term among many others.

    There's always increased traffic usage, though I doubt that affects work much. I wonder also if they'll push this on the page where you have to choose a search engine (when you install it). "If you use google, you get this feature too."

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by AnonymousClown ( 1788472 )
      Tell me about it! I was searching for articles on milk and milk's affect in the mouth, lips, blowing bubbles, hair and saliva glands anyway, I mistyped and put in milf and BAM! these site with these naked women having sex and other things that I just can't say! How could this happen!?!

      I mean really, no one actually goes out and searches for pornography! Google just puts it there when you accidentally mistype something.

      You gotta be carful!

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by froggymana ( 1896008 )
        I don't think that having it display something NSFW should really be an issue. When someone first mentioned something about this I was curious (good thing I'm not a cat) about what would happen if you do type something like "milf" or "porn" into google instant search. As it turns out google doesn't display any results for things of that nature and just says "press enter to search" which is no different than the "old" google.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by SHaFT7 ( 612918 )
        I tested that this morning, and I found as I typed m-i-l, the searches continued to refine. If I typed the 'f', then NO searches came up, and it said "press ENTER to search". If I backspaced the "f" and added a "k", then instant search started working again. Seems they have some cool catches in there. FYI, I just tried the same thing with the word "porn". once I typed the "n", I got no instant searches. BTW, I have safesearch OFF and instant ON.
    • Me, I just had visions of a lot of people ending up at whitehouse.com, instead of where they wanted to go ...

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Likely the same place you turn off the suggestion service in the current Chrome: Options->Under the Hood.

      Amazes me that people cry about Google knowing what URLs you type in because of this and are too ignorant to turn it off. Sure, it'd be good if it were off by default, but I'm quite happy as long as there is an *option*.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by m50d ( 797211 )
        And then they shift the option in every release, until people get fed up of turning it off. And then they make it autoupdate to on. No, if something nefarious is on by default that's enough of a problem that we should call them on it.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by jpapon ( 1877296 )
      It seems likely that it will have some form of safe-search.

      But then again, if they just made it so you can't turn it off, it would happen to everyone, so nobody would be getting embarrassed by it happening.

      This would have the side benefit of giving you the "Google MADE me do it" excuse if you were ever caught browsing things you shouldn't have been at work. Just make sure they don't see you have 5 other tabs with equally suspicious titles.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You turn it off by using firefox search bar.
      In terms of usability, of a single text field and submit button, it's down hill from now on.

    • or god forbid an Anal-yzer, power.

    • I'm a ghost-writer, I do research and write white papers, so Google Instant equaled faster research which equaled more research per time period, which equaled more money. This is only going to be another pay raise for me - w00t Chrome 8!

      PS: Don't write illegal things into a form on a modern website? Anyone halfway decent with computers should know websites can always log that sort of information.

  • Awesome Bar? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by morari ( 1080535 )

    So it's going to be like the annoying Awesome Bar that was implemented in Firefox?

    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      People are still whining about that?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by The MAZZTer ( 911996 )
      No, Chrome has already done that stuff for a while now. This overlays a google search page over your web browser as you type.

    • But the Awesome bar IS awesome. by remembering a few keytstrokes, you can reach any page previously visited. It really IS progress if you actually try to use it. Actually, now that Firefox 4 has effectively killed plugin backwards compatibility, the Awesome Bar is the only thing that keeps me from moving to Chrome.

  • bad excuses to not use chome (I guess I will have to one day...)

  • So they want our complete URL history? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by wal9001 ( 1041058 ) on Tuesday September 21, 2010 @02:12PM (#33654144)
    Sounds like a not too subtle excuse to send every URL you type back to your targeted advertising file at Google. Were there a separate search box, I'd be less cynical, but one has to wonder if this was always their vision for what the browser bar should do.

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Chrome already remotely sends that info for Google DNS (I think), URL suggestions, and malware detection services when you type an address into the URL bar. But it's easy to turn those three services off. So will this one be.

    • Re:So they want our complete URL history? (Score:4, Informative)

      by jojoba_oil ( 1071932 ) on Tuesday September 21, 2010 @02:49PM (#33654660)
      Actually, Chrome has been doing that for ages with the existing suggestions. I setup a Squid cache for my house and found letter-for-letter requests coming from computers using Chrome. Try it yourself if you're curious--or you can just turn off suggestions.

    • Re:So they want our complete URL history? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 21, 2010 @03:24PM (#33655188)

      The interesting thing about Google Instant is that it was really a vehicle for Google to permanently enable Search Suggestions.

      Previously on their webpage search options, you could turn suggestions on or off.

      Now that dialog has been replaced with Google Instant on/off. Turning it off leaves you with the old style suggestions enabled (no way to disable). That, in turn, allows them to track everything you type. Don't be evil indeed.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by MushMouth ( 5650 )

        Holy smokes, you are right. Where is EPIC and the EFF in all of this? This is far more insidious than I realized. Right now the only solution that I know of is to shut off javascript for www.google.com or use a menubar search in a non-chrome browser (with suggestions off)

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Pentium100 ( 1240090 )

        Or just disable javascript for google.com

  • Hasn't this already been done in Opera and other browsers? How is this innovative?

    • Because Google is doing it.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by cgenman ( 325138 )

      Chrome already does search-from-bar and live suggestions. What this does is put live search *results* over the page you're currently looking at. It's a browser extension of how google's .com search page works now. While it isn't a revolutionary feature, as far as I know nobody else has implemented it.

  • Features (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Reality Master 101 ( 179095 ) <.moc.liamg. .ta. .101retsaMytilaeR.> on Tuesday September 21, 2010 @02:15PM (#33654184) Homepage Journal
    I love Chrome, and don't miss Firefox at all (and especially don't miss my system being brought to its knees by the constant memory leaks that seemingly can't be fixed), but I wish they would focus less on whiz-bang features, and focus more on filling in the gaps in the core features. Things like "Print Preview" and "Properties" when you right-click an image come to mind.

    • I love Chrome, and don't miss Firefox at all (and especially don't miss my system being brought to its knees by the constant memory leaks that seemingly can't be fixed)

      On some systems Chrome has a memory overrun problem when you start chrome (it wants to use all the ram and then proceeds to use all of the swap). At least Firefox's memory leak takes hours.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Things like "Print Preview" and "Properties" when you right-click an image come to mind.

      If you'd like to see those implemented, please star/comment on these bugs:
      http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=173
      http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=9278

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Potor ( 658520 )
      I agree, especially re: properties.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cgenman ( 325138 )

      Considering how long Microsoft has given up on I.E., how stagnant Firefox is, and how much trouble Opera has been as of late, it's nice to see a developer that's actually pushing forward with browser development.

      Chrome is all of 2 years old. Recent "bloat" includes plug-ins and a show all downloads page. Keeping their browser synchronized with how their home page handles searching doesn't seem like bloat to me at all.

      I don't know. I want those whiz-bang features, if they're actually useful. I want a rea

    • Firefox has been rock solid and the memory leaks appear to be fixed for quite some time.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Interoperable ( 1651953 )
      Or reasonable tab overflow handling.

    • I love Chrome, , but I wish they would focus less on whiz-bang features, and focus more on filling in the gaps in the core features. Things like "Print Preview" and "Properties" when you right-click an image come to mind.

      http://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/#enable-print-preview [peter.sh]

      There is already a work in progress with a Chrome 7 switch for "Print Preview". The Chromium team doesn't recommend enabling these, but I've used a couple of them and have found them to be really useful. You just have only yourself to blame if something crashes.

      I feel these are definitely worth looking at if you have the skills to enable them.

    • Same here. But my work policy doesn't let me use Chrome. They cite 'security reasons'. Firefox is ok though.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by m50d ( 797211 )
      Try konqueror. No adverts in the new york times, no giant corporate sponsorship, just quietly building a really good browser.
  • ... If I'm wrong, but doesn't Chrome and most other browsers do this already. I've used it several time sin the past few minutes. I skimmed TFA but I didn't see anything new except that page turn button.

  • Chrome 8? I'm still on Chromium 5 apparently, and it's from this year!

    • At least Google isn't as bad as Sun.

      One day I was on Java 1.4, and then next thing you know, POOF, I'm on Java 5!

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by badzilla ( 50355 )

        I cannot tell you how annoying I used to find this as a newbie to Java. The Java world has enough twisty confusions without unnecessary extra ones.

        • Are there any aspects of Java that aren't unnecessarily complicated?

          Go try and tell a computer newbie what JRE is, its relation to Java, and why they need to install it.

  • Nifty is a relative term... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by feidaykin ( 158035 ) on Tuesday September 21, 2010 @02:23PM (#33654290) Journal
    I suppose it is "nifty" for folks that actually like the instant search feature, but I've been happily avoiding it by doing my searches through the URL bar in Chrome. Guess they'll take that option away, too? Oh well, I'm not going to nerd-rage about it like some of the posts I've seen on Slashdot. It's just a minor annoyance to me but I'll likely still use Chrome to browse and Google to search. I really like Chrome, mainly because it's one of the few browsers that's lightning fast when I have lots of tabs with Flash heavy content open. That's probably only because of my aging hardware, and it's not like Firefox is really sluggish on my system, just noticeably slower.

    Plus Chrome has other neat features, like when I type the URL of a site I have searched before, you can search that site again by pressing tab, so I don't need to have a bunch of different search boxes for different sites like I do in Firefox. Anyway, I guess I'll reserve my judgement until it's actually implemented, maybe they'll do it in a way that isn't too irksome or distracting.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ZsoL ( 902409 )
      Karma whore! :D
    • why not just click the "turn off instant search" button....
    • Well the obvious way to implement it unobtrusively would be to show the "instant" results where it currently shows the pages from history and guesses at what you're typing. Possibly formatted more like google search results or something.

      But at the very least it should be easy to turn off. I mean, I currently use the search bar as a calculator occasionally, and I'm going to be pretty pissed if chrome decides to overwrite my current webpage with a search for a calculation.

  • Works on passwords too! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rwa2 ( 4391 ) * on Tuesday September 21, 2010 @02:24PM (#33654298) Homepage Journal

    Hey! Did you know if you type in your root password into the search bar, it can list your computer in the search results?

    It works on Slashdot too... see, here's mine: ********

    / accidentally his password in the google search bar the other day
    // it's different now

  • I often use the search bar at the top as a temporary writing area for transient things, like to craft an URL which I would then paste into something else, or to write out an equation that I happen to see (Sometimes I use the browser to review notes)
    It wouldn't be very fun if the page I was looking at suddenly vanished to be replaced by a search page, just because I was trying to crystallize my thoughts for a second. Of course I really should be using a separate editor for transient notes but it seems so co

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rdnetto ( 955205 )

      I use the Windows address bar for this (and for file paths - I don't think I've ever used them for URLs though since Chrome is so much faster). Anyone know of any good alternatives for Ubuntu?

  • Missing feature (Score:3, Interesting)

    by CODiNE ( 27417 ) on Tuesday September 21, 2010 @03:16PM (#33655090) Homepage

    Okay, my Chrome pet peeve here.

    Let's say you open a bunch of background tabs while reading a page. One of the tabs doesn't load for whatever reason, when it times out, instead of putting the attempted URL in the address bar it leaves some kind of about:blank internal page that tells you what happened. That's great, thanks for the info, now click refresh. Nope, the page is gone forever. Go back to the first page and hunt through the links comparing them against the loaded tabs and hopefully you find the one you wanted.

    • Maybe this is a problem with release versions? Chrome 7 gives you a link on the page which you may click to refresh.

  • I love new features! I love new features with an off switch even more!

  • Today, my boss called me into his office to show me the web site of a potential business partner. When he began to type 'virginia' into google, it auto-completed his search with his recent search for 'virgin boy assholes'. I have to go on business trip with him tomorrow. I'm a young guy. FML

    Taken from #36396 [fmylife.com]

  • Technically true (Score:4, Insightful)

    by The_mad_linguist ( 1019680 ) on Tuesday September 21, 2010 @04:19PM (#33655826)

    " It seems as if Google isn't running out of ideas for its browser anytime soon"...

    That's true, but they are running out of good ideas.

  • I could care less about searches.. but because chrome uses the least real estate, it is nice on my netbook... but IT IS HORRIBLE with system resources... I have to restart chrome at least three times a day to clean out the memory. And I only average 5-6 tabs being open. That is really sad for a browser.. that is worse than FF.. and if I could get FF to use less real estate as well, I would just use it and ditch chrome.

  • Really? (Score:1, Redundant)

    by rinoid ( 451982 )

    People really care about this?

    Put me down as Who Cares.

  • I really wish they would focus on having the search bar offer good options from the browsing history and not from Google searches. Firefox's awsomebar is the last advantage Firefox has over Chrome, IMO. In FF I can easily get back to pages I use often or search my bookmarks through the address bar and the results are instantaneous while on Chrome searching the history is slow and half of the result are Google suggest results which are just not useful.

  • Even Slashdot users don't know about CyberSearch? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7931/ [mozilla.org] or http://cybernetnews.com/cybersearch/ [cybernetnews.com] . This has been public at AMO since June 2008 and at their site earlier than that.... Granted, this one really ought to be built into Firefox (like Tree Style Tab) so more know about it, since it's not just a niche use.

    One particularly handy tip you might miss about the add-on: type "^" and then your search term to instantly search the site already loaded in the s

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by brettz9 ( 969574 )
      I neglected to mention that you can also disable the Google page from appearing--I find I can often get a good enough idea about the site I'm looking for, just by looking at the URLs and titles in the URL drop-down... (Wonder if Chrome will actually let you do that and miss out on the ads...)
  • They should be working on fixing the Google Update malware so that updates are only performed manually on user request.

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