Mountain View, California — Striving to make the web search speedier, applying its prowess in computer science, world’s largest search engine giant Google has come up with yet another advance feature dubbed as “Instant Pages” is aimed at making browsing significantly faster through a search-mechanism by pre-loading web pages on its own, even before users click on them, the search giant announced.
Instant Pages, the most prominent amongst an array of new mobile and desktop search features Google unveiled on Tuesday, is a service in which the search engine predicts the link a user is likely to click. After inputting a search query, users will be able to open results almost instantly.
Further, the company said that earlier, page loads from Google Search would require about 5 seconds to complete. The company pointed to the homepage for The Washington Post, which takes 3.2 seconds to load in average circumstances, but shows up instantly with the help of Instant Pages. Overall, the new feature is expected to save 2 to 5 seconds on search query time, is based on Google Instant, which furnishes search results even before the user has finished typing the query or pressed the enter key. Google Instant is likely to be included in the newest test version of Google Chrome browser.
Ultimately, Google’s top priority with Instant Pages, its top search scientists said Tuesday at a press event at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, is to make loading an Internet page feel as instantaneous as flipping a TV channel.
Google’s aim “is to deliver you the information you seek in the blink of an eye,” said Google Fellow Amit Singhal, who leads Google search. “What we are finding is that as people save more time, they are searching much more, which often has a positive impact on our business.”
“Taken all together, it was kind of a broadside by Google today that they are not going to slack off the pace of innovation,” said Hadley Reynolds, director of search technology with research firm IDC.
Google unveils Instant Pages. (Credit: CNET)
“Instant Pages can get the top search result ready in the background while you are choosing which link to click, saving you yet another two to five seconds on typical searches,” said Singhal on the official Google blog.
“As you scan the results deciding which one to select, Google is already pre-rendering the top search result for you. That way when you click, the page loads instantly,” he added.
In addition, Instant Pages embellishes the company’s launch last year of Google Instant, a feature that shows results as a query is being typed into the search box. According to Google, Instant, along with Instant Pages, will help users save between 4 seconds and 10 seconds each time they search the Web.
In order to deliver instant results to users, Google is pre-rendering results “when we are confident you are going to click them.” Though Google did not say how many queries it has been able to accurately predict, the company did say that it has been working on the feature “for years” and so far, it has proven “fairly accurate” at predicting when it should prerender results.
Google, which gets most of its revenue from search-based advertising, is enhancing Internet features as its major rivals, Microsoft Corp.’s Bing and Yahoo, have been slowly gaining share against Google’s supremacy in U.S. desktop searches, but those gains may be slowing. Analysts agreed Tuesday that innovations like Instant Pages could make Google even stronger in a market it already dominates — search advertising.
“I think that could have a pretty significant importance for traffic market share and ad revenue,” said Karsten Weide, an IDC analyst who studies Google’s ad business.
The Instant Pages feature will gradually become available to users of Google’s Chrome browser in coming weeks. However, Google said it was also opening access to the software so other browsers, such as Firefox and Internet Explorer, could incorporate that capability.
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