Yesterday Google showed off its latest product, dubbed Google Instant (you can check it out using this URL: http://www.google.com/webhp?sclient=psy). If you remember last year Long Zheng worked up a prototype of something quite similar, using the Bing API:
Of course now Long has his hand out, and began today by chiding Bing for not taking the lead, but then a comment on that post led him to a presentation by Bing at this year’s World Wide Developer’s Conference (WWDC, an annual Apple event), where Bing showed off some very interesting experiments, using HTML5:
Bing HTML5 Preview
Of course what makes Google Instant so interesting is its use of auto-complete, (something Long Zheng held out of his release 
), not only making searches potentially faster and easier for the user, but filtering up the most popular (and most lucrative, one would think) searches out of a much smaller subset of the full Google index. So even with fancy Ajax or HTML5 tricks, there’s still quite a bit going on under the hood with Google Instant, but Long’s experiment and the Bing presentation open up questions as to Bing’s next move.