Google made the Chrome Omnibox search box event faster saying the search results are four times more likely to be shown within 500 milliseconds.
Chrome Omnibox search faster. Google said “searching in Chrome is now even faster, as search results are prefetched if a suggested query is very likely to be selected. This means that you see the search results more quickly, as they’ve been fetched from the web server before you even select the query.” Google said it is four times faster, “our experiments found that search results are now 4X more likely to be shown within 500 ms,” Google wrote.
What is the Omnibox. It is what you see as the search box on the Chrome browser, but more technically the Omnibox is an API method that allows you to register a keyword with Google Chrome’s address bar. The omnibox API provides a third party extension a way to customize the suggestions displayed in the drop-down, when the user enters a keyword defined by the extension.
Here is a screenshot of this:
Default browser required. Google said for the prefetching to work and make the Omnibox results faster, the search engine you select must be set as the default. Google said this can only happen “if Google Search is your default search engine.” This also means that other search engines can also enable this “by adding information to the query suggestions sent from their servers to Chrome, as described in this article,” the company said.
So third party search providers can leverage this speed bump too, if they want.
Why we care. A lot of users use Chrome, and many of them use the Omnibox built into Chrome. Often Google shows search results in the Omnibox, as well as local snippets, facts and other information. Maybe, making the results faster can lead to more searches and traffic to your website.
