• Fast Company, Tuesday, December 14, 2010 1:28 PM

In case you were wondering, Google Instant is entirely without brand bias. Google swears! "What we do at Google and what we've done for years is to not inject any subjectivity into these algorithms," Amit Singhal, Google Fellow and head of the company's search quality, ranking, and algorithm team, tells Fast Company.

"We didn't want to introduce any bias into the mathematical modeling -- our modeling is predicting, given a letter, what's the probability of completion." Debuted a few months back, Google Instant is a results-as-you-type feature, which, according to Fast Company, "has been criticized for having a brand bias." Some noticed early on, writes Fast Company, "that many Instant queries were dominated by major brands: type E, and the first suggestion is eBay, J gets you JetBlue, V for Verizon, and so forth." The million-dollar question, obviously, is whether these results had been bought. The answer? Absolutely not, says Singhal.

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