Search Advisory

Internet marketers are all abuzz (aTwitter?) about Google Instant, which was announced and launched yesterday. In case you haven’t played with it already, it takes Google’s autosuggest one step further.  Autosuggest used to pop up a box, under the search query field, with 10 suggestions as to what you may be searching for.  For example, type in “pop” and the system would suggest that you may be looking for “poptropica,” “popeyes,” or “popular mechanics.”  Searchers could ignore these suggestions and finish typing their query to get to the search results they were looking for, or they could scroll down and choose one of the items offered.  At that point, the results page would refresh and display the organic and paid listings relevant to that query.

Enter Google Instant.  Now, the autosuggest box displays four suggestions as to what you may be searching for.  The real difference is the search engine results page – it changes to reflect these suggestions as you type each letter. Type “p” and (for me, anyway), “publix,” “pandora,” “pizza hut” and “papa johns” are displayed, both in the autosuggest box and on the results page.  Add an “o” after the “p” and the suggestions – and displayed results – change to “poptropica,” “pottery barn,” “powerball,” and “post office.”  As each letter is typed, everything changes.

Google heralds Google Instant as a “quantum leap” in search.  Their stated goal is to get searchers to better results faster.  The company says that the typical search used to take 25 seconds — nine to type the query, less than one for Google to display the results, and 15 seconds for the person to decide which link to click on.  Google Instant shaves between two and five seconds off of every search. Add that up, and it’s 3.5 billion seconds per day.

How will Google Instant affect various stakeholders? It’s impossible to predict fully, but here are some preliminary thoughts.

Searchers

First, there are those 3.5 billion seconds per day saved worldwide. Of course, they’ll be saved in 2-5 second increments, so I’m not convinced that we’ll all suddenly have newfound time (to blow on Facebook, no doubt).

Second, searchers will see the results page change as they type, which could either (a) be a distraction, displaying irrelevant information, or (b) be helpful, either adding depth to their original search (“I was looking for Popular Mechanics, but look – Popular Science is also available!”) or bringing them to what they were looking for faster and more directly.  I suspect the question of whether Google Instant is a distraction or helpful will vary by query – sometimes it’ll be a positive and sometimes it’ll be a negative.

Currently, Google Instant is only available when Google.com is accessed on a computer in the United States.  It’s not available yet on mobile devices, on lesser-known browsers, or in most other countries (that’s all coming soon).  It’s also not available when you use the Google toolbar, iGoogle, your browser’s search box, or if you had disabled Google’s autosuggest feature before.  So unless searchers go to Google.com and run their searches there, for now at least, they won’t notice a difference at all.

Advertisers

Marketers often want their company’s website to show up both in the organic and paid listings on the search engine results page.  How will Google Instant affect them?  According to Google, it won’t have much impact.  I’m not so sure.

First, let’s think about “long tail” keywords. These are lengthy keywords that are very specific – think “New York hotel near Times Square” versus “head” keyword “New York hotel.”  Searchers use long tail keywords because they’re more likely to display the specific results they’re looking for, and marketers love them because they drive website traffic that’s highly qualified and likely to convert.  The average search query has 20 characters (sidenote: so Google Instant would change the results page up to 20 times before you finished typing the average query), so a lot of people are using long tail keywords.

Given this, you might be surprised to find out that Google has consistently, over time, discouraged search engine marketers from targeting long tail keywords.  Over two years ago, we talked about this on the pay-per-click side in our newsletter article “Rage Against the Machine.”  In short, long tail keywords are often penalized with low quality scores in Google AdWords.  This past spring, Google’s “Mayday” algorithm update specifically targeted long tail keywords on the search engine optimization side of the equation, making it harder for pages to rank high organically for these longer terms.

Google Instant seems to push searchers toward choosing “head” keyword results even more. On the PPC side, imagine you’re an independently-owned hotel in Manhattan, running ads for the term “New York hotel near Times Square.”  This has probably worked well for you, driving qualified prospects to your site at an affordable price, since this keyword isn’t all that expensive.  But now, when a searcher starts to type that specific query into Google and gets to the “New York hotel” part of it, the search engine results pages display ads for the large, international chain hotels that can afford to bid high on the competitive “head” keyword “New York hotel.”  Some percentage of searchers will continue to type in “near Times Square,” making your ad visible, but certainly some will be siphoned off, never to see your ad nor visit your hotel unless you pony up like the big boys.

Same thing on the organic side.  If you had a web page optimized and ranking high for “New York hotel near Times Square,” it’ll still be displayed for searchers that type in all 32 characters.  But some, as of yet undetermined, number of searchers will be distracted by the organic listings that display during the 31 different versions of Google results pages while they’re typing each character.  Many of which, no doubt, include other New York hotels.

That said, for searchers who persist in typing their long tail keyword into the query box, optimized content may be more visible than it was before – displayed in the autosuggest box rather than buried on page two or three of the results.

I anticipate more attention being paid to the order of words in web page title tags and headlines. It’s even more to marketers’ benefits to have the most important word in a search term at the very beginning.

Note that the autosuggest box pushes the organic listings further down the results page, often “below the fold.”  So organic results just lost yet more real estate (we talked about “universal search” pushing organic results down in our March newsletter).  Interestingly, the paid listings (in other words, the listings that Google makes money off of) don’t seem to be affected here.

While Google has said that Google Instant “uses prediction, not personal data,” this isn’t entirely the case.  Google Instant certainly knows what location the searcher is in. Just search for “dry cleaners” – I get “dry cleaners atlanta” in my search suggestion box, as well as the usual “local 7 pack” with a map of seven Atlanta dry cleaners in the results (all by the time I had typed “dry c” in the query box).

(We had also talked about personalized results in that same March newsletter – organic ranking reports are continuing to be less and less meaningful.  How do we report that your website was ranked #3 organically for a fraction of a second, for the search “dry c” for one searcher in one city at one particular point in time?)

So…does this geographically personalization affect the paid listings as well?  Certainly, AdWords advertisers are used to having control over where their ads are displayed geographically. It’s hard to tell if Google Instant will muddy the waters here or not.

Finally, advertisers are always concerned with analytics, and measuring campaign data accurately.  As the Google results page changes with every keystroke, what’s considered an “impression”? Note that this is an important question, not only on the PPC side (where an increase in impressions without an increase in clicks will decrease click-through rates and quality scores, having a negative impact on the AdWords campaign), but also on the SEO side (for those using Webmaster Central to track the impressions of their organic listings).

Google is defining an impression three ways now:

• The person types a query into the search box and either presses the Enter key or clicks on the “Search” button (this hasn’t changed - these actions continue to display your organic listing or paid ad and an impression is counted).
• The person starts to type their query, sees a results page displayed (even if they haven’t finished typing), and clicks anywhere on that page.
• The person stops typing and the results are displayed for three seconds or more, implying the searcher is scanning the results page.

So will this increase impressions or decrease them? It may increase them if your site’s displayed more often as the results page changes while searchers are typing.  It may decrease them if searchers get distracted by autosuggested results and never finish typing in the long tail keyword that would have displayed your site.  I suspect the results will vary for different advertisers, and probably even different keywords.

And note that PPC advertisers may enjoy a number of free impressions as their ads are quickly displayed while searchers are typing.  These impressions won’t even be counted as impressions by Google, yet searchers who read the ad in under three seconds may eventually become customers.

Google

Finally, how does Google Instant affect Google?  It’s a feature that the other search engines don’t have…right now, anyway. Yahoo actually had the exact same service in beta in 2005 (and AlltheWeb had Livesearch in 2006).  Neither search engine rolled it out because they didn’t have the infrastructure to do it.  If you think about the computing power necessary to change the autosuggestions and the results page up to 20 times during the average, 20 character query…it’s a bit mind-boggling.

So this is yet another competitive advantage for Google. Not just Google Instant as a feature, but the fact that any upstart search engine hoping to unseat Goliath will need yet more servers, yet more power, yet more brains to even hope to try to catch up with the 800 pound gorilla.

(Sidenote: many industry pundits think that Google’s timing on this announcement was intentional.  Since Bing and Yahoo have just rolled out their much-publicized integration, this effectively serves to put all eyes back on Google.)

As noted previously, Google stands to make more revenue from AdWords advertisers in two ways. First, the increased emphasis on expensive “head” keywords means advertisers are going to have to pay more to be visible earlier in the search process.  Second, with the autosuggest box pushing organic listings further down the results page, searchers may be more likely to click on the ads that are still prominently displayed.

Of course, none of this is Google’s stated result for launching Google Instant.  Google’s focus has always been on providing a good user experience, and faster is usually better. Perhaps more people will use Google, perhaps they’ll search more, perhaps they’ll be guided to what they’re looking for faster.

The overall effect of Google Instant will likely not be understood for quite some time, but one thing’s for certain.  Love it or hate it, Google continues to push the envelope on innovation. Who knows what future developments may be built on Google Instant’s foundation, whether by Google, or other visionaries who may enhance it and take it even further?

More Info

About Google Instant (from Google)

Google Instant Search: The Complete User’s Guide (Search Engine Land)

Disable Google Instant: How To TURN OFF Google’s New Feature (Huffington Post)

COMPANY UPDATES

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