Google Inc. is on a mission to ?shrink down? the time users spend searching by about 11 cumulative hours across a billion queries a day!

And the way to do it, according to the Mountain View, US-headquartered company, is to obviate the need for typing in complete queries or ever hitting the search button.

Last week, the internet search giant took another step towards realising this dream and rolled out its Instant service in Asian markets such as India, Singapore, Japan, and Australia. ?It is search as you type,? said Ben Gomes, distinguished engineer, Google, in a video conference from Mountain View. ?This is among the biggest changes that I have seen in search in my 10 years at the company.?

The Instant feature goes a step ahead of the auto-complete service that offers suggestions on what users might be looking for even before they finish typing. Now, the auto-complete suggestions are accompanied by the search results for the top prediction. For example, just typing in the letter ?c? in the search box in India currently returns cricket scores as the top prediction. In addition to suggesting ?cricket scores? as the complete query, the page displays results for the same.

The average user takes 9 seconds to enter a search query, which is typically 20 characters long, explained Gomes. By displaying results even before the users finish typing, the service can potentially save 2-5 seconds per search. Across a billion searches, that works out to around 11 hours, he added.

What is happening in the Google Instant search machine here is that the typed character is sent to the back-end where a prediction is generated and returned to the user. Beyond this, the top prediction is again sent to the back-end, where the top results for that prediction are returned in the same manner as if it were a completed query. When the query is altered, say by adding the letters ?o? and ?m? to the initial typed character, the process is repeated. The top prediction for ?com? in India currently, for instance, is Commonwealth Games 2010. In addition to that auto-complete prediction, a results page for the Games is also displayed.

?This requires a lot of complex algorithm, a lot of java script,? said Gomes. Not least in this list are functions such as maintaining user state and cache. The first keep the search engine cognizant of what results have already been generated for a query, and the second prevents repeat queries being issued to the back-end. ?We have turned search from an HTML page to an application. Search is now a dialogue. It is closer to the way Google mail and Maps works,? he said.

Minus these engineering fixes, or taking what Gomes calls the ?na?ve approach?, would have meant doing anywhere near 20 billion searches a day?a sure-shot formula to send its data centres into meltdown mode. ?The part that was in some ways the hardest was the efficiency and the scaling of this process,? said Gomes. ?If we are doing queries with every character you type, and an average query is about 20 characters, that is 20 billion queries a day. There is no reason to do more searches than there are people on the planet!?

Google had earlier launched the service in markets such as the US, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Russia.

Explaining the rationale for the staggered launch, Gomes said that the company had to make sure the back-end integration was in place before it could introduce the service in different geographies. The company has also been careful to build in a stop-service option into the product which automatically turns off Instant for slow connections.

Ask Gomes about the next frontier in Instant search, and his ready reply is that plans are underway to launch the service on the mobile phone. ?There was a demo at the US launch of the Instant, but there may still be some time before we can work everything out,?said Gomes.

There are at least 670 million mobile phone users in India, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai). That is around 10 times the estimated internet penetration in the country till 2009.

On the business side, Vinay Goel, director of product management, Google India, said, Instant is unlikely to impact the advertisers in any meaningful way. ?The focus is on user experience. None of what we are launching today should have any bearing on how advertisers work,? he explained.