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Searching the Web is like being a sniper with little talent but lots of ammunition. You guess at the right search term and hit "return." And you almost got the results you wanted. So you refine it and submit another search. Then you refine it again and again until finally, you're looking at a reinterpretation of Le Grande Odalisque with Jeannie from "I Dream Of Jeannie" posing on the sofa.

(Well, what do you search for on a Tuesday afternoon 40 minutes before it's time to go home- )

Yesterday, a new Google Search feature went live: "Google Instant." I'm not entirely sure why Google bothered to rent out the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and invited press from all across the country for a livestreamed media event. Honestly, all I have to do is tell you "Go to Google.com and start typing out a search string" and you'll pretty much get the whole concept.

Go ahead ... I'll wait.

Welcome back. Yes: as soon as you started typing, Google started to guess about what you were looking for.

Those of you who just kept right on reading and haven't tried a Google search have a smirk all loaded up and ready to fire. You've seen that before.

No, you haven't. Google isn't populating a mere popup menu with search strings that you might want to execute. Instead, Google pushes those search results directly to your browser window. And it does it almost as fast as you can type.

Still not trying it- Fine. You're right, I suppose it'll be more exciting if I just describe it to you, anyway. Here's the search results that appear as I type.

"B" - A restaurant I looked for earlier today, which happened to start with "B." The pages is filled with other restaurants like it.

"Bo" - Boston. I live in the Boston area. The page contains a Google map of the city, a collection of tourist photos, hotel information, news, and visitor information.

"Bon" - Bonanza Bus Lines. Lots of bus routes from Boston to East Coast destination, from multiple bus carriers. Last week I did a flurry of searches in a desperate attempt to see if I could get to New York City in time for an 8 AM breakfast meeting without spending $400 on either a last-minute commuter flight or a night in a hotel.

"Bond" - Mostly financial information.

"Bondo" - Bingo: a basic page of search results on the legendary patching compound.

I'm not actually seeing the specific information I need here on the page. But I tap the down arrow key to scroll through the list of other guesses. As I tap, the search results change, never taking more than a second to update. When I land on "Bondo wood putty" I'm looking at lots of information on basic furniture repair.

Yup, that's exactly the sort of results I was hoping for. I hit Return to complete the search and then I start clicking links, as usual.

Google Instant is a simple tweak but it speeds up the triage process hugely. You also should be logged into your Google account, so that Google Instant can be a bit more "psychic" in its predictions. Witness how closely my own demo hewed to my recent Search adventures.

For now, it only works if you visit Google.com directly, and Instant only works with specific browsers that are sufficiently AJAX-studly (Google named Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer 8). Mobile browsers aren't supported yet, and neither is the little search box that's hardwired into most browsers these days. Google says that support for both will be rolled out in the next few months.

Great stuff.

Still, it seemed odd that Google would stage a whole special event for this announcement. It was done almost like an Apple rollout; it was even held at a venue just across the street from where Apple unveiled all of their new iPods a week earlier. They maintained Apple-style secrecy; I received an invite, but they provided no information on the content, so I stayed home.

No problem: Google streamed the event live to the whole world.

All to show off a feature whose demo really begins and ends with "Go to Google.com, start typing a search, and see what happens." If I'd paid $600 in travel expenses to be there in person, I'd be in the parking lot afterwards looking for cars with Google campus parking stickers to key.

It speaks to the difference between Google and all of the other major tech players. They don't make products - though they do refer that way to their "search product" and other features. They're a company that makes infrastructure and services. With that in mind, it's easy to think that Google sees events like this one as necessary ... just to remind us all that the clean water and reliable electricity doesn't just magically appear from nowhere.

Even Google Instant's initial lack of support for browser search boxes seems like a strategic win for the company. The day before the announcement, people were asking me what I thought about the interactive bubble-logo that had appeared on Google's search page. This was the first I'd heard of it; I hadn't typed "Google.com" into a browser's address field in months.

Google has taken it to an odd level, though: Google Instant will also be promoted with a TV commercial. They even blew the dough to license Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and the famous "music video" footage from the 1965 Dylan documentary in which he flips through the lyrics on cards. Why does Google even care if people are aware of an automatic enhancement to a free service that they almost certainly already use-

What does God need a TV commercial for-

It's the brand. Google is fighting a minor battle to prevent themselves from being Band-Aided, Velcroed and Q-Tipped.

Google has already lost that battle, but in a cheerful way. Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer can manically bellow the word as loudly and as frequently as he wants, but no man, woman, or child has ever knowingly "Binged" the Web. Even when they use his search service, they're still Googling.

Band-Aid's problem is that they're now seen as just another random company that makes adhesive bandages, and not as inventors and innovators. Google's potential problem is that the public might stop thinking of Google Search (and all of Google's other services) as the brilliant work of passionate men and women who get a paycheck every week, and start seeing it as a simple part of the world's infrastructure.

Worse, people might start thinking of Google Search, as a feature of Firefox, or Safari.

This kind of recognition will become more important as Google continues to inch into consumer space. In the coming weeks, the first TVs with Google TV enhancements will show up in stores. There are also strong and persistent rumors that Google wants to get into the e-book business and start competing with Amazon, and that they want to get into the digital music store business and start competing with Apple.

They're already directly competing with Apple via their very successful mobile OS. If Google doesn't start asserting its rightful place in the public consciousness, then the waves of phones and tablets running the Android OS will be seen as victories for their respective makers, and not for the company that made it all possible.

So go ahead and put your logo out there, Google. Just don't change yourselves too much in your pursuit of mass-culture hipness. I like the fact that you're still a bunch of nerds. Even your executives always look like they're wearing the item of equal or lesser value that they got for free when they bought one pair of pants or shoes at Sears' original price.

If I ever entered a media event and saw them dressed any hipper than that, I'd be so shocked that I'd require self-medication immediately after the presentation.