Say hello to Google Instant, launched overnight.
Go to Google. Type the letter “R” and Realtor.com appears in the search result list.No button click required. Keep typing and the search results change on the fly.
My first impression as a user is positive. It is just neat. As a geek, I marvel at the engineering and infrastructure required to pull this off for millions of simultaneous users. As a guy who helps real estate companies with SEO and SEM — I’m still figuring it out.
What is clear is that Google has fundamentally changed search, and quite possibly has raised the bar for search user experience — unless the novelty wears off and it becomes annoying.
What is far less clear is what this means for SEO and SEM.
TechCrunch has one of the more level and least speculative write ups on that….
SearchEngineLand, on the other hand, seem to be trying not to wet its pants…
Keith says:
Seems like it is geo-coded too. Happen to be around Tri-state area, and when I type in “L”, I was expecting “Linked-In”, but got “LIRR”, which is the train system for New York, Long Island area.
September 9, 2010 — 8:38 am
John Rowles says:
It does factor in location, which is helpful when searching on GPS-enabled mobile devices, like G’s own Droid.
September 9, 2010 — 8:52 am
Genuine Chris Johnson says:
This will favor shorter searches, won’t it. More expensive PPC phrases.
September 9, 2010 — 12:15 pm
Cheryl Johnson says:
It seems to me that something of a user’s previous browser history is factored in, too.
For example, my company is Bob Taylor Properties, Inc. If I type “bob t” into Google instant, Bob Taylor Properties is the third item in the instant drop down list.
I know we are popular, but of all the possibilities for “bob t” we are number 3?
September 9, 2010 — 6:00 pm
Dan Connolly says:
Cheryl were you signed in to Google when that happened? That type of search result comes normally when you are signed in, whether you are in Google Instant or not.
September 9, 2010 — 10:15 pm
John Rowles says:
@Dan: Yup.
@Chris: That was my first thought, too, but as I read some of the reaction to Google Instant yesterday (and there was a lot of it), one point that came up a couple of times was that it has the potential to encourage *longer* searches over time.
Searches have been getting longer just in general for years. With this, people can see the results of adding detail to queries in real time. The longer the queries get, the more specific the results offered become.
If that happens, content that has been buried on page 2+ of results b/c few people used to bother paging past page 1 will be surfaced under the search bar.
At the end of the day it will depend on the user and the search. A less-sophisticated user might start off with “real estate in your town” and, like now, they will be presented with ads purchased for that broad term, only there will be more of them and whatever advantage there was to being in spots organic 4-10 will be diminished, as those organic results are below the fold on a lot of monitors.
On the other end, a user who has already learned to use longer, more specific queries who falls into the majority of people who move locally will continue to use local knowledge to form longer searches, perhaps more so, and this will favor agents who put some thought into the keywords that are relevant to the specific listings that user is after.
September 10, 2010 — 4:31 am
Thomas Johnson says:
Is this the triumph of zestifarming and patient construction of an organic long tail presence?
September 10, 2010 — 5:38 am
Mike Taylor says:
Personally, I find it annoying. The mechanics behind it are fascinating, but from a user POV I am likely to turn it off. It remains to be seen what the average joe thinks and does. I agree that for the most part, it will favor shorter searches and could kill the long tail.
September 10, 2010 — 6:34 pm
Alex Cortez says:
It sounds like a great concept and all the back-end tech that it involves is phenomenal, but as an end-user I think I would find it irritating (alas, with time it might grow on me). Either way, looking forward to seeing what the SEO gurus have to say about this.
September 10, 2010 — 8:23 pm