SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Google Inc. stepped on its Internet search accelerator Wednesday by adding a feature that displays results as soon as people begin typing their requests.
The change, called "Google Instant," is the closest the 12-year-old company has come yet to realizing its founders' ambition to build a search engine that reads its users' minds.
The achievement wasn't lost on Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who jokingly told reporters that the company's lightning-quick computers are morphing into the "other third" of people's brains.
"I think it's a little bit of a new dawn in computing," Brin said Wednesday.
The shift means Google users will begin to see an ever-evolving set of search results appearing on their computer screens, potentially changing with each additional character typed. That means a satisfactory set of results could take just one keystroke. As an example, a person who types "w" in Google's search box could see the weather results in the same area as where the request was entered.
Google will also try to predict what a person really wants by filling out the anticipated search terms in gray letters. Below that, in a drop-down box, Google will still offer other suggested search requests, as the site has been offering for the past two years.
