Steven Hood, a former product manager for Yahoo!, claims that Google Instant was invented by Yahoo! in 2005.

Hood, in a blog post, says that the company had rolled out an AJAX-based online application tool called Live Search, which is remarkably similar to Google Instant.

"[Google Instant] is a fundamental change to a user interaction model that's been largely unchallenged for years... By all accounts this is a bold and brave innovation. Which is why it may surprise you to learn that Google Instant is actually five years old. Yahoo built it back in 2005," Hood said.

Hood, who led a team that cooked up Live Search, said that the tool was "our biggest project and crowning achievement." He adds that the application gave search suggestions and provided results pages in "real-time" as you typed. Hood claims that "it was almost exactly the same product as Google Instant."

Hood says that there are differences, noting that "to avoid the distraction of shifting the result set down the screen as the user typed," search suggestions from Live Search were displayed on the left side of the page, rather than in a window below the search box. In spite of admitting that suggestions from Yahoo! probably weren't as accurate as Google's, Hood says, "they were still quite good."