Search market leader Google has announced details of the new Google Instant feature which will go live next week. The web search tool brings instant listings into the SERPs (search engine results pages) as you type. The results change as you type more, giving instantly changing suggestions the further you go into the query.
Google says the main reason is that we take too long to search. We currently take around nine seconds to type in a query (on average) and around fifteen seconds looking through the results. Google believes that this can be reduced by 2-5 seconds.
The main concerns regarding censorship were answered during the initial press conference, where examples were given that proved certain phrases and words had been blacklisted. This prevents the chance of indecent or violent results appearing before the query has been properly entered.
First thoughts for SEO are that long tail keyphrases again take a hit. A phrase such as ‘laptop repair London’ for which a website was top of Google for, will now retain less traffic due to the possibility of the first part of the phrase answering the browsers query. After typing in ‘laptop repa….’ there will be instant results for laptop repair which people can then click on or simply press enter. This could be a national firm who are number one for laptop repair, and they will take a percentage of the long tail phrases.
After the Mayday algorithm updates this is another blow for small to medium sized businesses and affiliate service providers. This is obviously part of the bigger picture with Google, wanting to offer new technology (perceived as being better) to retain competitive advantage over Bing and Yahoo.
This also rings true of the statements made by Matt Cutts after the Mayday changes to long tail key phrases, where the emphasis was being placed on better results in the top rankings. They described the changes as a ‘quality win’, indicating they want more of the mega-websites to perform like Amazon. These websites were offering a better service to customers according to Google after the recent enquiry into search result changes.
One thing is true now, the bigger websites with more investment will gain more market share, as longer tailed search phrases again take a hit and SEO companies have to target more generic search terms.
