If you’ve been to Google’s homepage today, you may have noticed something different.
The usually vibrant colors in the Google logo have been replaced by gray ones. But start typing in whatever you’re searching for and the colors start to fill in again.
It’s part of Google’s new instant search feature that was unveiled today.
This feature is designed to make searching on Google even faster, the search company says, and that it will save around 2 to 5 seconds per search.
Google Instant will be available in Chrome 5 and 6, Firefox 3, Safari 5 and Internet Explorer 8 beginning today to users in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia. It is not yet available in Google subdomains such as News or Image search, but Google says it will be coming in the next few months.
Additionally, the Google Instant will be coming to the mobile space and will be available later in the fall.
Personally, I’d rather have the search field stay right where it is while I’m typing than speed up my search by a whole 2 seconds. I turned it off as soon as I figured out how.
This “improvement” reminds me of their background image “option” a few months ago and the automatically on Buzz in Gmail a few months before that. They’re starting to remind me of Facebook by implementing new features without telling or asking their users. Not cool, Google. I don’t want you making decisions for me.
This feature is horrible. Just Horrible. Try backspacing to change your search query….it goes through an instant search during each letter you delete while backspacing..needlessly wasting time. Along with it’s moronic changes to the image search and the annoying fade in feature as you enter Google.com, Google is rapidly doing its best to come in second to Bing.com .. which at this point is the superior search engine. Google needs to step back and realize one of the fundamental key’s to success. If it ain’t broke…don’t fix it. Change, just for the sake of change, is a sure way to destroy a product.