Whenever I see "Google Instant" reference, I get always chuckle because I swear that two of my friends and I actually invented it back in '09 for a Yahoo sponso

Whenever I see "Google Instant" reference, I get always chuckle because I swear that two of my friends and I actually invented it back in '09 for a Yahoo sponsored Hackathon. I clearly remember one day logging onto my machine, going to google to search for something and just sitting there with my jaw on the ground as the "instant" feature began searching as I typed. I must've sat there for at least 5 minutes. I then proceeded to call my friends and made them go to google to "just execute a query". The response was "those motherf&kers actually ripped off our idea". I will say, while the idea was "new" (no one was doing it at the time as far as we were aware of), the hackathon code was pure garbage PHP and JS fueled by free pizza & soda and stitched together to leverage the Yahoo APIs. We went back and actually looked at our server logs (it was running a .edu/students/ site at the time as part of our portfolios) and noticed SIGNIFICANT traffic spikes from Google & MSFT registered corp IPs. Unfortunately, we figured there was nothing we could do to prove that we* invented it. Something for you to chuckle at: - Only reference I could find is a wayback link to the 2009 hackathon page ("Skynet Search" was also 'contextual' and knew if you wanted images or maps or directions without having you to make extra clicks). There used to be a blog post mention on yahoo as we got some runner-up prize. [1] - Google Instant Launched Sept 2010 [2] [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20091024035258/http://developer.yahoo.com:80/hacku/show/2009/feb/washington https://web.archive.org/web/20091024035258/http://developer.... [2] https://www.google.com/doodles/google-instant-launch https://www.google.com/doodles/google-instant-launch