Google Instant Inspires Instant Imitators

Within days of Google’s launch of its Google Instant predictive search technology, which leverages Ajax to let users see results as they type a search query, software programmers built similar applications for other Google web services.

The most famous was YouTube Instant, built in three hours by Feross Aboukhadijeh, a computer science student enrolled at Stanford University, the birthplace of Google.

YouTube Instant lets users search YouTube video content in real-time. YouTube Co-founder Chad Hurley liked it so much he offered Aboukhadijeh a job via Twitter.

Map, Image search

“I built YouTube Instant using a combination of the YouTube API and scraping YouTube search suggestions,” Aboukhadijeh wrote on his blog on 11 September.

“I initially ran into some issues when Google automatically blocked my server for making too many repeated requests to the search suggestions endpoint.”

In five minutes, he rewrote YouTube Instant to query YouTube directly for search suggestions. Whether Aboukhadijeh will take a job with Google or not is unclear. He told AllThingsDigital he’s already working as an intern for Facebook.

Meanwhile, programmer Michael Hart wrote two web services: Google Maps Instant, built with jQuery and the Google Maps API, and Google Images Instant.

Google Maps Instant lets users quickly search location all over the world while Images Instant recalls image in rapid fire as users type queries.

To help users keep track of all the instant services coming to the fore, programmer Tam Denholm built Instantise, an aggregation website for predictive web services patterned after Google Instant.

See TechCrunch’s amusing take on the aggregator here.