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| Photo via D.Vincente on Flickr |
Getting search results before you've searched was so funny 10 years ago that Google ran it as it's April Fool Joke. Now, with Google Instant, Google is almost offering just that.
Searching while logged into a Google account and via the latest browser displays search results as you type. Google's vice president of search and user experience, Marissa Mayer, estimates that Google Instant saves the average searcher two to five seconds per search and across the globe this adds up to a saving of 11 hours every second.
However, some commentators have poured scorn on Google Instant, pointing out that while the rest of the world is moving towards social networking, Google's own attempts to join have failed - look no further than Buzz - and all it can come up with is predictive searching.
Some are also saying that Google Instant could kill off search engine optimisation, with no two users seeing the same results, although it's not clear how much difference personal search history will affect the results.
Depending upon which camp you're in, Google has either stolen another march on rival Bing or it's papering over the cracks of its doomed search engine.
Searching while logged into a Google account and via the latest browser displays search results as you type. Google's vice president of search and user experience, Marissa Mayer, estimates that Google Instant saves the average searcher two to five seconds per search and across the globe this adds up to a saving of 11 hours every second.
However, some commentators have poured scorn on Google Instant, pointing out that while the rest of the world is moving towards social networking, Google's own attempts to join have failed - look no further than Buzz - and all it can come up with is predictive searching.
Some are also saying that Google Instant could kill off search engine optimisation, with no two users seeing the same results, although it's not clear how much difference personal search history will affect the results.
Depending upon which camp you're in, Google has either stolen another march on rival Bing or it's papering over the cracks of its doomed search engine.
Try it out. It's a little bit strange until you get used to it.
ReplyDeleteI need some time to really think this through, but initial thoughts:
1. Google adopted the Yahoo!-style predictive search a little while back. What it actually does is to help narrow the search market - less search terms means greater volume on the most popular searches. This also makes those search terms even more competitive, pushing up the CPCs and of course, Google's revenue.
2. Showing dynamic results as you type or pick from the predicted searches is a little helpful to a user, but Google's relevance engine still has to decide what result to put where. From my 5min 'play', it doesn't look like that algorithm will change.
On the one hand it means the volume of longer tail keywords will decrease because there's more volume in the popular terms.
On the other hand, searchers needing a more specific result type longer search terms. It could be argued that they're then even more valuable searches. That's certainly the case right now.
It'll be interesting to see how this unfolds.