Search that keeps up with your typing

Typing feels immediate now

Search used to wait 250 milliseconds after you stopped typing before it did anything. That is long enough to feel like the page is thinking about whether to help you. It is now 33 milliseconds, roughly two frames.

To be precise about what that number is: it is the pause before the request starts. It is not a promise that the search finishes in 33ms. But the dead air at the start is gone, and that is the part you actually felt.

Your search has an address

Type a query and the address bar becomes /?q=your query. That URL is real: send it to someone, bookmark it, or open it fresh, and the server renders those results into the page directly. No blank grid, no flicker while JavaScript catches up.

This also fixed a genuinely irritating bug. Search for something, open a meme, press Back, and you used to get a flash of the ordinary latest-memes grid before your search reappeared. The server did not read the query, so it rendered the default page and let the browser correct it a moment later. Now the search results are in the first response, so Back returns you to exactly what you were looking at.

Results stop reshuffling

Page 1 used to be sorted newest-first while later pages were sorted by relevance. Paging through a single set of results silently changed the ordering rule underneath you.

Both now rank by relevance. The best match is first, and it stays first when you page.

What is not covered

Only the query travels in the URL. If you have changed your sort order or how many results you want, those are saved in your browser rather than the link, so a shared search opens with the site defaults. Your scroll position is not part of the link either.