I Turned Off Google Instant
Thu Sep 9, 2010 1:53:36 pm

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Google wasn't working properly for me yesterday. Every time I tried to modify my search terms, the entire search text that I was editing disappeared, which made it impossible to continue with the edit. I was only able to get Google to work by starting over from the beginning with an empty search page, which was very annoying.

I was not certain of the cause of this problem. I had just reinstalled my operating system. It was possible that I had a buggy version of Firefox or some libraries were missing. I had done a minimal installation of Debian Lenny and I was manually selecting the additional packages that I wanted. I could have missed a critical Firefox dependency, but no other website the I regularly visit was malfunctioning.

Now I know the real reason for the problem. Google introduced Google Instant yesterday and it's defective. It is supposedly a system that shows search results while you type in a manner different from, and supposedly better than, the predictive text that they had already been using. I haven't seen it actually work and don't know if it's any good when it's functional. I disabled it on the Google Preferences page and Google works properly again.