Google recently unveiled Instant, a search enhancement which show results as you type. The real technical challenge here is scaling the backend, which now needs to handle a lot more load. The frontend implementation, however, is quite simple. Yearning for some web development, I decided to get my hands dirty. Here's a minimal implementation in under 60 lines of jQuery code.

Instant Search relies on two separate data sources: a suggestions API, and a web search API. Roughly speaking, it works as follows: as you type in the search box, AJAX requests are made to the suggestion API. The top suggestion is then used as the query to search. In this case, I used the following two services, both of which support JSONP:

• Suggest: http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search
• Search: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web

To make your own search instant, all you need are your own suggest and search feeds, and some tweaks to my code. Just make sure your server can handle the load!