Google Instant on Kundra, Kushi, KOAT

Google's new instant search feature promises results instantaneously with every letter typed into the search bar. But I find it more annoying than useful.

Google Instant also performs searches based on your location. A search for federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, using just his last name, pops up different letter-by-letter results in Washington and New Mexico.

The location specific default of Google Instant became apparent when I typed in a "K" into the search bar field here at What's Central in northeast New Mexico. The "K" prompted Google Instant to pop up three Albuquerque TV stations by their call letters as the top results: KOAT, KRQE and KOB.

When Nextgov executive editor Allan Holmes typed "K" into his computer located at the Watergate in Washington, the first result he saw was the Kings Dominion amusement park just north of Richmond, Va.

This location-skew continued when both Allan and I typed in a "U" after the "K." My first hit for those two letters was KUNM, the public radio station in Albuquerque, with a local translator I can pick up here in The Original Las Vegas. Google decided Allan really needed to know about the Kushi Izakaya & Sushi restaurant several blocks away in Washington.

Google Instant seemed to drop its geo-mania once Allan and I both typed the third letter in Kundra's name: We both got "Kung Fu" and a Wikipedia entry for Kundalini, some sort of yoga thing.

Google finally delivered results on the federal CIO only when Allan and I typed the fourth letter of his name, making all the results beforehand an interesting intellectual exercise, but neither relevant nor useful.

But if your mission is to make money by organizing all the world's information, developing a location specific way to display it sure can help the bottom line by steering folks to restaurants, amusement parks and TV stations.

Knowledge, however, has no boundaries, and we need to keep that mind as Google takes us down the instant search rabbit hole.