Of the 5,135 of you who voted in this week's poll on the subject, 53.2% said you did like the search giant's latest real-time features and functionality. Thirty percent of those who voted said they disliked Google Instant, and around 16.7% said they were as yet uncertain what to make of the new set of features.
Google Instant was the talk of the tech village throughout the week. The feature launched on Wednesday morning and was immediately rolled out to all Google web search users. In essence, the point of Google Instant is to make searches faster by instantly predicting text you might be about to type into the search box and quickly loading results for those queries. It's dynamic, a bit frenetic and, some say, quite a bit faster than searching the web in the traditional fashion involving an "Enter" keystroke.
Those of our readers who like Google Instant were fairly evenly split as to why they like it. Half stated the new search experience was delivering good search results -- a pragmatic reason for liking any new feature from a tech company -- while around 45% said the new features were simply entertaining to use and watch. (We have to admit, we had some fun with Google Instant, ourselves.)
When it came to those of you who disliked Google Instant, the majority (67.2%) said your discontent stemmed from a sense of information overload. Indeed, there's a lot going on in the Google Instant UI, and if you already know what you're searching for, the sudden and ever-changing plethora of data and options can be overwhelming. Only 4% of those who disliked the feature said you didn't like Google Instant because you didn't use Google for web search. And 28.8% of those who are not Google Instant fans said they dislike it for another reason altogether.
