Microsoft’s top search executive has tried to play down the significance of Google Instant, which it launched in September with much fanfare, saying it “gets in the way” of users and that reactions to it have been “mixed at best.”
“We think speed to task completion is better than speed to results,” Satya Nadella, senior vice president for R&D with Microsoft’s Online Services Division, told reporters when asked about the technology at a San Francisco press event Wednesday.
Google Instant displays search results immediately when a user starts typing a query, and updates them in real time as additional letters are added. Google calls it a powerful technology that can shave valuable seconds off the time it takes to do a search.
Microsoft is studying Google Instant and has done its own tests to see how people react to it, but it’s not clear that users like to have results flashed up on the screen “when you don’t expect them,” Nadella said, claiming results from its tests have been “mixed at best.”
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