Google Instant
Since going live last week there has been much published and posted regarding the most recent innovation by Google – Google Instant.
How will it affect search, search marketing and SEO for businesses seeking that all important first page listing?
Google Instant – what does it do?
It replaces Google Suggest and displays results based on the suggested completion of the phrase being typed character by character. As the phrase is entered the results below change as you type.
How distracting might it be when continually changing results are displayed and will it sidetrack searchers from their intended search when a suggestion takes their fancy off on a tangent.
What effect might it have?
The affect it will have on SEO and indeed PPC advertising (as it affects the ads displayed as well) will only be known over time.
But, it will be necessary to monitor your analytics in more detail and watch carefully if there is an ‘Instant’ effect on either visitor numbers or the related search terms associated with them.
If there is no change then well and good but if there are large and obvious variations it will certainly need investigation and it may be necessary to more closely align content to these suggested phrases to maintain search page result positions.
If you are wondering what all the fuss is about having not yet seen or been aware of the change in Google’s search it is probably due to not being logged in to your Google account, if you have one that is, where it is turned on by default!
Whether ‘Instant‘ will be rolled out to general search is yet to be seen.
Here is what Google say about it on their blog:-
“Search as you type. It’s a simple and straightforward idea — people can get results as they type their queries. Imagining the future of search, the idea of being able to search for partial queries or provide some interactive feedback while searching has come up more than a few times…
“As you can imagine, searching even before someone types isn’t easy—which is why we are so excited today to be unveiling Google Instant.
“Google Instant is search-before-you-type. Instant takes what you have typed already, predicts the most likely completion and streams results in real-time for those predictions—yielding a smarter and faster search that is interactive, predictive and powerful.
“Here are a few of the core features in Google Instant:
Dynamic Results – Google dynamically displays relevant search results as you type so you can quickly interact and click through to the web content you need.
Predictions – One of the key technologies in Google Instant is that we predict the rest of your query (in light gray text) before you finish typing. See what you need? Stop typing, look down and find what you’re looking for.
Scroll to search – Scroll through predictions and see results instantly for each as you arrow down.”
This Google video explains Google Instant in greater depth:-