Programmers inspired by Google Instant have built their own predictive search applications for YouTube, Google Maps and Google Images. Their efforts could land them jobs at Google, Facebook or elsewhere.
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 3 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.
"I built YouTube Instant using a combination of the YouTube API
and scraping YouTube search suggestions," Aboukhadijeh
wrote
on his blog Sept. 11.
"I initially ran into some issues when Google automatically blocked my
server for making too many repeated requests to the search suggestions
endpoint."
In 5 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.
That has bidding war for someone's services written all over it down the
road.
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 locations all over the world,
while Images Instant recalls images 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.
Does the surf of Google Instant-inspired Web services portend a fad or a
fixture in the Internet applications market?
eWEEK holds this is probably a fad. However, it's also a vehicle for which
talented programmers will be rewarded with jobs at Google, Facebook, Twitter or
Yahoo for their efforts.
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