I've found Google Now on my phone (Moto Razr Maxx) to be nearly unusable due to the slowness. Until now.
Reshared post from +Lifehacker
In case you missed it yesterday: If searches using the Google Search or Google Now apps on your Android phone are painfully slow, this tweak will give you a serious speed boost:
Speed Up Slow Google Searches in Android with This Tweak
If tapping the search bar and typing a search term inside the Google Search app seems painfully slow on your Android device, you’re not alone. Thankfully, there’s a an easy—albeit experimental—fix that can speed up those searches significantly, and all you have to do is disable a built-in system app to do it.
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When you do that, you cannot find Apps any more by typing (parts of) their names. Considering how long it takes to materialize a list of all apps on various places, Google should have considered significant caching at this very place …
I can't say that I've ever used that method of finding Apps. Especially since there's a dedicated button to finding them.
That said, I agree that it's a bad design from the Google team, and I hope it will be natively fixed.
I actually found Apps this way, sometimes by accident, when I hat 300+ Apps ..