Today, at Google’s search event, the Mountain View company announced a new search service titled Google Instant. Google details that over one billion users use the company’s search service each week. Those billions and billions of users, on average, take nine seconds to type a search query and an additional fifteen seconds selecting the appropriate returned result. Google is banking on reducing both of these times by displaying predictive search results as a user types their search query. For example, “the gi” into the search bar will result in instant results for the novel “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” The user will also be presented with several alternative query suggestions for the original string “the gi” (much in the same way search suggestions are presented now). The feature is rolling out today in the U.S. for all users of Chrome, FireFox, Internet Explorer 8, and Safari. Google Instant will begin to appear internationally in the U.K., France, Italy, Germany, and Spain beginning next week.

UPDATE: Google demoed Google Instant running on Android — an original Motorola DROID to be exact — and said it would come to the platform “later this fall.”

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comScore has released their search engine numbers for July of 2010. The search market share numbers were gathered using a new methodology which only accounted for explicit searches (typing a search query in a text box) as opposed to including automated searches in the results (via hovered text for example). Analysts had predicted that removing automated searches would put a serious dent in Google’s search engine market share, and although the company’s metics did fall, a precipitous decline was not present. Google ended July with a 65.8% piece of the search pie (down from 66.2% in June), Yahoo! increased from 16.7% in June to 17.1% in July, and Bing stayed constant month-over-month at 11.0%. AOL shed a tenth of a percentage point from June to end up with a 2.3% share. All this occurred with a 15% jump in the number of users running search queries from a year prior and an almost 11% increase from June. Anyone recently abandon Google for another search provider? Any pros and cons you’d like to share?

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Silicon Alley Insider pulled out a pin and burst the bubble that pushed Twitter to the top of the Wednesday’s tech news with its claim of  a staggering 800 million search queries a day. According to SAI, Twitter is over-inflating its search query numbers by counting queries that are generated via its web page and third party client software that conduct searches using Twitter’s API . This latter source of queries may be causing the search number to skyrocket as many third party clients allow users to setup automated lists/columns that poll Twitter every 30 seconds when searching for a term or topic of interest. One person using Tweetdeck with one column searching for @BGR could easily generate 2880 search queries a day; multiply that by the millions of Twitter users using third party clients and you can see how that search number can balloon very rapidly. In the end, it all comes down to the definition of  what constitutes a search query. Is it an individual user manually entering in a search term? Or is it any query regardless of whether it is is manually entered or automatically generated at a rapid interval?

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Twenty four billion. That is how many times users are searching Twitter per month; a truly gargantuan figure. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone noted that twitter.com now handles roughly 800 million search queries per day, a 33% increase from April of this year. To put that number in perspective, Yahoo! handles roughly 9.4 billion search queries per month, while Bing handles around 4.1 billion. Almost makes you a bit more tolerant of the fail whale, now doesn’t it.

[Via Reddit]

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The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the FCC has begun investigating Apple’s rejection of Google’s official Google Voice application and the subsequent removal of similar third-party apps from the App Store. You know the story by now — Google submitted the app, it was rejected, third-party GV apps were then pulled, everyone was pissed, somehow heat was deflected on AT&T, AT&T called BS and so on. Well apparently the FCC has decided to step in. The WSJ reports that letters were sent from the FCC to Apple, AT&T and Google seeking information on the matter. Specifically, “the FCC asked why Apple rejected the Google Voice application for the iPhone and removed related applications from its App Store. The letter also seeks information on how AT&T, the exclusive U.S. iPhone carrier, was consulted in the decision, if at all.” The Journal claims to have obtained the letter that was sent to Apple, which you’ll find in its entirety after the jump. We truly hope that — if nothing else — the FCC manages to take Apple down a peg where its ridiculous app approval process is concerned. For the sake of developers’ sanity, if nothing else. Our favorite part of the letter:

What are the standards for considering and approving iPhone applications? What is the approval process for such applications (timing, reasons for rejection, appeal process, etc.)? What is the percentage of applications that are rejected? What are the major reasons for rejecting an application?

Is there anyone out there who wouldn’t love to see Apple’s responses to those questions? Priceless.

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