The new search could play havoc with an advertisers Google Quality Score
It will take a couple days before you see Google Instant but in this age of fast food, the instant (deliberate use of the word) reaction would be to try it out. Regardless of what you do, Google Instant is here to stay and will display results as you type.
If everyone uses Google Instant globally, the online search giant estimates this will save more than 3.5 billion seconds a day. That’s 11 hours saved every second. Around 15 new technologies contribute to Google Instant functionality.
“We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type,” states the Google official post.
Benefits If you don’t want to see results as you type, you can turn off Google Instant by clicking the link next to the search box on any search results page, or by visiting your Preferences page. Google Instant is starting to roll-out to users on Google domains in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Russia who use the following browsers: Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac and Internet Explorer v8. Please note, users on domains other than Google.com can only access Google Instant if they are signed in to a Google Account.
According to analytics company Experian, in July, Google was responsible for about 71 percent of all Web searches, followed by Yahoo with about 14 percent and Microsoft’s Bing with just under 10 percent. Google anticipates that ‘Google Instant’ will not slow your internet connection, but the company plans to automatically turn it off for very slow connections.
Criticism: Google insists that ‘Google Instant’ — not available on mobile as yet — will not affect rankings. However,
according to Adam Bunn, Head of Search at leading independent search and social marketing agency Greenlight, when it comes to search engine optimisation campaigns (SEO), some websites may now suffer a drop in traffic. This service could also potentially result in complications for rank checking software and impact on search demand figures given by Google’s keyword tools.
With regards to paid search, Matthew Whiteway, Director of Campaign Management (paid search) at Greenlight, says it could play havoc with an advertisers Google Quality Score. Whiteway also says Google’s motives for doing this must be questioned. Given the “longtail” is becoming increasingly important, with search queries, the cost-per-click (CPC) Google can charge for “longtail” keywords is significantly lower than that on one or two keyword search queries. Therefore the more people search for “longtail” search queries, the less money Google can charge the advertiser.
Google’s development uses AJAX to dynamically serve search results as you type. Each time a new recognisable word or phrase is typed that changes the results set in a meaningful way, Google will fetch the search results for that word – without you having to hit “search”. So, if you’re intending on searching for ‘scary books suitable for children’, Google might first fetch results when you’ve finished typing ‘scary’, then ‘scary book’, then ‘scary books’, then finally ‘scary books suitable for children’.
Bunn believes this is a mightily impressive display of processing power on Google’s part. “Now, for every search you do Google may have to process anywhere from a couple to half a dozen different searches. It has got to do this fast enough to keep up with your average typing speed. This, on top of the fact that retrieving and sorting thousands of documents in a split second is already a modern marvel — admittedly one that few people spend much time thinking about,” says Bunn.
According to Bunn, SEO campaigns including long multi-word keyword variants may see a drop in traffic for those keywords as a result of streaming search. “For example, if a website has optimised for and holds good rankings for ‘cheap car insurance UK’, that term may lose search traffic as UK users find that the shorter ‘cheap car insurance’ returns several relevant looking results, negating the need to finish their sentence.”
Bunn points out that the constituent parts of longer keywords are often the types of generic keywords that are typically dominated by big brands and powerful sites with the cash to maintain rankings in an extremely competitive keyword space. “So for smaller websites, this could well be a case of first Google giveth (the “May Day update”) then it taketh away (streaming search results).
Ramifications for paid search: In relation to paid search, the question is whether Google will count each refresh / change of the search engine results pages (SERPS) as an impression for the advertiser. Whilst some advertisers will believe increasing the number of impressions / eyeballs that see their ad will help improve brand awareness and brand recall, from a pay per click (PPC) marketing perspective, this increase in unwanted impressions could play havoc with an advertisers Google Quality Score.
“At Greenlight, we are constantly looking for ways of reducing wasted impressions for our clients with the objective being to improve click through rate (CTR) and therefore relevancy, one of the most important factors of Google’s Quality Score”, says Whiteway. “If Google is going to count these dynamic changes / refreshes to the SERP then should we also expect to see some fundamental changes to the Quality Score algorithm, the keyword Match Types, or do we simply need to increase the number of negative keywords in the account to several hundred thousand? Only time will tell.”
