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Gmail doesn't even have substring search (e.g. searching for "hack" will not find instances of "hacker"). I think that would be a prerequisite for Instant-style searching.

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No it wouldn't, instant search doesn't search substrings, but strings it thinks you are about to type in.

You could create a lookup table of those for each GMail account in the background even if you didn't have substring search.

True. But it's worth noting that those predictions are sufficient for a slow, partially-working substring search. Gmail could search for the n most likely completions of your query terms in addition to the normal search, and collate the results.

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